> Can it? Is this within the range what Google is allowed to do in the EU right now?
Google's current GDPR consent screen is not compliant. It provides an easy "accept" option but no easy decline option, which is against the regulation.
Given they are already breaking the law and successfully getting away with it (otherwise they'd stop), why would they not break it here?
In fact, it doesn't even have to be malicious; the data can accidentally be fed into a dataset that's used for ad targeting - maybe it was set up that way a decade ago, nobody knows about it and it isn't entirely obvious considering the entire targeting machine is a black box with thousands of parameters so it's impossible to definitely prove what data was used to target a particular ad.