Google is set to pay $391.5m to settle allegations about how it collects data from users.
According to forty US states, the technology giant tracked the location of users who opted out of location services on their devices. It is the largest privacy-related multi-state settlement in US history.
Google has been told to be transparent about location tracking in the future and develop a web page telling people about the data it collects.
A Google official said: “Consistent with improvements we’ve made in recent years, we have settled this investigation, which was based on outdated product policies that we changed years ago”.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 month prior, Google agreed to pay Arizona $85 million over similar issues concerning how it collects location data. There is also an outstanding case on the topic in the US courts, after Texas, Indiana, Washington and the District of Columbia took legal action against Google in January.
On claims of misleading consumers, the knowledge of a user’s location helps advertisers target products and location services help Google generate $200 billion in annual advertising revenue.
Oregon Attorney General, Ellen Rosenblum, who led the case, alongside Nebraska Attorney General, Doug Peterson, revealed that for years, Google has prioritized profit over its users’ privacy. She noted that the technology giant has 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 use that information for advertisers.”
Ellen Rosenblum
The Attorneys General stated that Google had been misleading consumers about location tracking since at least 2014, breaking state consumer-protection laws.
The company has been told to significantly improve user controls and the way it discloses location tracking, starting from 2023.
Google fined €500m by French competition authority
A year prior, Google was hit with a €500 million fine by France’s competition authority for failing to negotiate “in good faith” with news organizations over the use of their content. The authority accused Google of not taking an order to do so seriously.
The fine was the latest skirmish in a global copyright battle between tech firms and news organizations. The French competition authority had earlier ordered that Google must negotiate deals with news organizations to show extracts of articles in search results, news and other services.
In 2019, France became the first EU country to put a new Digital Copyright Directive into law.
The law governed “neighboring rights” which are designed to compensate publishers and news agencies for the use of their material.
As a result, Google decided it would not show content from EU publishers in France, on services like search and news, unless publishers agreed to let them do so free of charge.
News organizations felt this was an abuse of Google’s market power, and two organizations representing press publishers and Agence France-Presse (AFP) complained to the competition authority.
Google on the other hand, expressed disappointment with the decision as it reckoned it acted in good faith throughout the entire process. It asserted that it is, to date, the only company to have announced agreements on so-called neighboring rights.
Google highlighted then that it was about to finalize an agreement with AFP that included a global licensing agreement and payments for press publications.
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