WASHINGTON: Delaware and 39 other states reach a $391.5 million settlement with Google to end a lawsuit accusing the tech giant of tricking users with location data privacy settings that didn’t actually turn off data collection. That figure marks the largest multistate privacy settlement in U.S. history.
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The multistate lawsuit centered on Google’s use of location data for digital advertising. The search engine company collects users’ personal and behavioral data to build targeted ads for its advertising customers, including users’ location data, which can be used to expose a person’s identity and movements.
The payout, the result of a suit brought by 40 state attorneys general, marks one of the biggest privacy settlements in history. Google also promised to make additional changes to clarify its location tracking practices next year.
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“For years Google has prioritized profit over their users’ privacy,” said Ellen Rosenblum, Oregon’s attorney general who co-lead the case, in a press release. “They have been crafty and deceptive. Consumers thought they had turned off their location tracking features on Google, but the company continued to secretly record their movements and used that information for advertisers.”
It may be recalled that Attorneys General from more than three dozen states started investigating Google in 2018 after the Associated Press reported Google ignored users’ requests to not track their location in their account settings. According to the settlement, Google violated state consumer protection laws by misleading customers about its location tracking practices starting at least in 2014.
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The settlement requires Google to be more transparent about its data tracking practices, including providing users key information about how it records location data and uses that data. The settlement also limits Google’s ability to use and store some types of location data.
Google described sever changes the company agreed to as part of the settlement in a blog post published Monday. The company will show users additional information when then turn on or off their account’s location settings, provide a new control that lets users turn off tracking and delete already collected data with a single process, and spell out its privacy settings more explicitly when people create new Google accounts.
“Consistent with improvements we’ve made in recent years, we have settled this investigation which was based on outdated product policies that we changed years ago,” a Google spokesperson said in an email.
