Attorneys General of four US states – District of Columbia, Indiana, Texas and Washington – are suing Google for misleading users about when the company was able to track their location. They allege that Google deceived users by collecting their location data even when they believed that kind of tracking was disabled.
In separate lawsuits filed on Monday, the AGs said Google deceived users from at least 2014 to 2019 by leading them to believe that turning off “location history” settings would make the service stop tracking their whereabouts. However, a user’s location could still be tracked by Google unless they also turned off settings in the ‘Web & App Activity’ section.
On its Help Centre, Google has said that if ‘Web & App Activity’ is turned on, all searches and activity from other Google services are saved in Google Account, so that customers are able to get more personalized experiences, like faster searches and more helpful app and content recommendations.
DC Attorney General Karl Racine said: “Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow customers to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access. The truth is that contrary to Google’s representations, it continues to systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data.”
Racine’s office is said to have started investigating how Google handles user location data following an Associated Press report in 2018. The AP had coordinated with computer science researchers at Princeton to verify its findings.
“In reality, consumers who use Google products cannot prevent Google from collecting, storing and profiting from their location,” the lawsuit says, adding “Google has an unprecedented ability to monitor consumers’ daily lives.”
Request to remove algorithm
The lawsuit alleges that Google profited from the deception through its advertising business and has requested the court to order Google to shut down any algorithms created with these data. It says location data is a key part of its digital advertising business that generated $150 billion in revenue for Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. in 2020.
CNBC quoted Racine as saying that it was an important clause in the lawsuit to deter other companies from pursuing similar types of alleged deception.
“If you have gotten access to a whole body of information that you clearly have programmed and made an algorithm to profit from, I would suggest that that is ascertainable information,” Racine said. “And therefore, we should figure out how much money Google has made using, in this case, DC user data on geolocation. Because we’d like to have that money back.”
Google is disputing the claims and will defend itself. Spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement: “The attorneys general are bringing a case based on inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings. We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data.”
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