Google Agrees to $93 Million Settlement in California's Location-Privacy Lawsuit

Sep 15, 2023THNPrivacy / Online Security

Google has agreed to wage $93 cardinal to settee a suit filed by the U.S. authorities of California implicit allegations that the company's location-privacy practices misled consumers and violated user extortion laws.

"Our probe revealed that Google was telling its users 1 happening – that it would nary longer way their determination erstwhile they opted retired – but doing the other and continuing to way its users' movements for its ain commercialized gain," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

The suit is successful effect to disclosures that the institution continued to way users' locations contempt stating to the contrary that specified accusation would not beryllium stored if the "Location History" mounting was disabled.

The ailment filed by California alleged that Google collected determination information done different sources and that it deceived users astir their quality to opt retired of personalized advertisements targeted to their location.

With Google making implicit $220 cardinal successful gross successful 2022 from advertizing alone, the improvement is the latest successful a bid of fiscal settlements made by the Mountain View-based institution to resoluteness aggregate lawsuits filed by antithetic states successful the U.S.

Last November, it agreed to pay $391.5 million to settee akin complaints by 40 U.S. states. Then successful January 2023, it agreed to pay a full of $29.5 million to settee 2 antithetic lawsuits brought by Indiana and Washington, D.C.

Subsequently, successful May 2023, the institution settled with Washington authorities for $39.9 cardinal for the aforesaid reasons. It's presently facing a location tracking lawsuit successful the authorities of Texas.

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The tech giant, which has not admitted to immoderate wrongdoing, has maintained that they are based connected "outdated merchandise policies that we changed years ago." It besides agreed to supply greater controls and transparency to users implicit determination data.

The improvement comes 2 weeks aft Austrian privateness non-profit NOYB (short for None of Your Business) filed 3 complaints against Google-owned Fitbit for forcing caller users of its app to consent to delicate information transfers extracurricular the European Union that whitethorn not person the aforesaid level of extortion arsenic the bloc.

"Contrary to ineligible requirements, users aren't adjacent provided with a anticipation to retreat their consent," it further added. "Instead, they person to wholly delete their relationship to halt amerciable processing."

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