Google agrees to pay Texas $1.375 billion and resolves two lawsuits that track users’ personal locations, secret searches, voice and facial data without permission.
The lawsuit was filed in 2022 by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Facebook’s parent company Meta agreed to pay a similar amount from Paxton last year to resolve facial recognition-related lawsuits.
“In Texas, big technology is not beyond the law,” Paxton said in a statement. “For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their audio prints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won.”
Paxton’s office also said it was “the highest national recovery from the Attorney General in enforcing state privacy laws.”
A Google spokesperson said the company has resolved the lawsuit without acknowledging fraud or liability, and has resolved the lawsuit without modifying its products.
“This resolves many old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere regarding product policies that we have been changing for a long time,” spokesman Jose Castañeda said in a statement. “We are pleased to have them behind us. We will continue to build robust privacy controls in our services.”
Google won previous victory in these lawsuits. For example, the Court of Appeals ruled that the company is not involved enough to face a lawsuit with Texas. The company initially responded by saying that Paxton had mischaracterized the product “in another breathtaking lawsuit.” For example, the company said that Google photos only scanned users’ faces to group similar photos, and did not use the feature in their ads.
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The settlement comes after a major anti-trust ruling that Google, along with proposed remedies, including the sale of Chrome, discovered that Google had illegally acted to maintain its monopoly on web search and advertising technology. (Google says it will appeal both rulings.)
Meanwhile, Paxton recently announced that he will challenge Senator John Cornyn in next year’s midterm elections.
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