Google said it would not appeal the fine.

Anna Fielder, a trustee at Privacy International, a group based in London that supports strong data protection laws, said the existing legal regimes in Europe and much of the world were ill equipped to meet the challenges of protecting personal information.

“Germany has the strongest data protection laws in Europe, and this is all they could do,” Ms. Fielder said. “Most businesses are not complying with data protection laws because the costs of noncompliance — I mean these tiny penalties — are so low.”

Google’s disclosure that it had collected the private information set off a series of investigations by regulators around the world, the majority of which were settled by Google with a simple apology or with fines that were considered trivial for the world’s biggest Internet search company.

In March, Google agreed to pay a fine of $7 million and to aggressively police its own employees on privacy issues to settle a lawsuit brought by 38 U.S. states. In Europe, Ireland and Britain dropped their inquiries and did not impose fines after Google agreed to delete data illegally collected in their countries.

The French regulator, the National Commission on Computing and Liberty, fined Google €100,000 in 2011. The lone criminal investigation to result from the incident, initiated by the state prosecutor in Hamburg, was closed without charges being brought last year.

Privacy law is enforced at the national level in the European Union. The top E.U. privacy body, the Article 29 working group, is an advisory committee to the European Commission and does not have the legal power to levy fines.

Mr. Caspar, the Hamburg privacy regulator, called on European lawmakers who are considering revisions to the main data protection law for the Union to allow for fines of up to 2 percent of a company’s annual sales. Based on Google’s revenue last year, the maximum fine would have been $1 billion.