Tue 25 January 2022:
Texas and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Monday, alleging that the company’s location tracking methods are deceptive and violate on users’ privacy in the United States.
According to Washington, DC Attorney General Karl Racine’s office, two other state attorneys general plan to file cases as part of a bipartisan effort to hold Google accountable over privacy.
“Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow customers to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access,” Racine said.
“The truth is that contrary to Google’s representations it continues to systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data. Google’s bold misrepresentations are a clear violation of consumers’ privacy.”
Google says that in recent years it has made several improvements to make location data easy to manage and understand, and has minimized the amount of data stored.
The lawsuits are the latest in a raft of legal salvos against the tech giant, whose search engine accounts for an estimated 90% of web searches worldwide.
Google Spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the “attorneys general are bringing a case based on inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings. We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data. We will vigorously defend ourselves and set the record straight.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleged Google misled consumers by continuing to track their locations even when users sought to prevent it.
Google has a “Location History” setting and informs users that if they turn it off “the places you go are no longer stored”, Texas said.
Google “continues to track users’ location through other settings and methods that it fails to adequately disclose,” Texas said.
European regulators in recent years have imposed multibillion-dollar fines on Google over competition issues, in an effort to curb its clout on the continent. Google, one of the world’s most profitable companies, helped Alphabet ring up $18.9 billion in revenue in last year’s July-September quarter.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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