Google has recently been handed a $1.2 million fine by Spain’s privacy watchdog, after it was found guilty of breaking data protection laws in Spain by merging its privacy policy for its assortment of online services, without being entirely clear on how it would using people’s personal data.

The case, which dates back to March 2012, when Google rolled out a new, combined privacy policy and terms of service for its various cloud computing services, which includes Google search, Gmail, and Youtube. The revamped policy essentially meant that users had no control over how Google could use or what Google would do with its customers’ private information they had given the company.

The amount of the fine, which represents the maximum punishable fine under Spanish law, is barely a pinprick to the search engine giant, who’s stock is trading at around $1,100 per share and has a market cap of $366.8 billion. However, the fine itself has more broad and potentially dangerous implications for Google, mostly because it’s not just Spain that is concerned about Google’s collection and use of personal information. An entire host of European countries are becoming concerned about the amount of personal information Google is collecting about its European customers in foreign jurisdictions.

With Google’s cloud services, any data that is uploaded is stored remotely on servers owned by the company, meaning that users have little to no control over what the company does with the information that’s uploaded. This is a matter of concern for a number of European privacy watchdogs, as we saw last month when Netherland’s data protection authority stated that Google had violated the Dutch Data Protection act as well. There are also ongoing investigations in three other European countries as well.

Google may be accused of being the bad guy in Europe, but in its latest Transparency Report out today, the web giant has attempted to show itself in a much better light, accusing several governments of attempting to censor its search results.