Google Agrees to $93 Million Settlement in California’s Location-Privateness Lawsuit

Sep 15, 2023THNPrivateness / On-line Safety

Google has agreed to pay $93 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the U.S. state of California over allegations that the corporate’s location-privacy practices misled customers and violated client safety legal guidelines.

“Our investigation revealed that Google was telling its users one thing – that it would no longer track their location once they opted out – but doing the opposite and continuing to track its users’ movements for its own commercial gain,” California Legal professional Normal Rob Bonta said.

The lawsuit is in response to disclosures that the corporate continued to trace customers’ areas regardless of stating on the contrary that such data wouldn’t be saved if the “Location History” setting was disabled.

The criticism filed by California alleged that Google collected location knowledge by different sources and that it deceived customers about their capability to decide out of customized commercials focused to their location.

With Google making over $220 billion in income in 2022 from promoting alone, the event is the most recent in a sequence of monetary settlements made by the Mountain View-based firm to resolve a number of lawsuits filed by completely different states within the U.S.

Final November, it agreed to pay $391.5 million to settle comparable complaints by 40 U.S. states. Then in January 2023, it consented to shell out another $29.5 million to settle two completely different lawsuits introduced by Indiana and Washington, D.C.

Subsequently, in Might 2023, the corporate settled with Washington state for $39.9 million for a similar causes. It is at present dealing with a location tracking lawsuit within the state of Texas.

The tech big, which has not admitted to any wrongdoing, has maintained that they’re based mostly on “outdated product policies that we changed years ago.” It additionally agreed to supply higher controls and transparency to customers over location knowledge.

The event comes two weeks after Austrian privateness non-profit NOYB (brief for None of Your Enterprise) filed three complaints towards Google-owned Fitbit for forcing new customers of its app to consent to delicate knowledge transfers exterior the European Union that won’t have the identical stage of information safety because the bloc.

“Contrary to legal requirements, users aren’t even provided with a possibility to withdraw their consent,” it additional added. “Instead, they have to completely delete their account to stop illegal processing.”