Google has agreed to pay the Texas state $ 1.375 billion to repay two lawsuits accusing the company of tracking users’ personal location, incognito searches and sound and face data without their permission.
Judicial proceedings were brought by Texas Prosecutor General Ken Paxton in 2022. Facebook Meta’s parent company agreed to pay a similar amount to pay a lawsuit related to facial recognition by Paxton last year.
“In Texas, the Big Tech is not above the law,” Paxton said in a statement. “For years, Google secretly traced people’s movements, private research, and even their sound prints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought again and won.”
The Paxton Office also said this is “the highest recovery nationwide against Google for the implementation of any Prosecutor General of the laws of state intimacy.”
A Google spokesman said the company is choosing lawsuits without accepting wrongdoing or responsibility, and without having to change any of its products.
“This resolves a host of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, regarding the product policies we have long changed,” spokesman José Castañeda said in a statement. “We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build strong intimacy checks on our services.”
Google won some of the previous victories in these lawsuits, for example with a decision of the Court of Appeal that the company lacks sufficient links with Texas to face a lawsuit there. The company initially responded by saying that Paxton miscarried its products “in another breathless process” – for example, the company said Google Photos just scanned user faces in order to group similar photos together, and that it did not use the function for advertising.
Techcrunch event
Berkeley, ca
|
June 5
Reserve now
The solution comes after major antitrust decisions that found that Google acted illegally to maintain monopolies in internet search and advertising technology, with proposed tools, including chrome displacement. (Google has said it will appeal both decisions.)
Paxton, meanwhile, recently announced that he will challenge US Senator John Cornyn in next year’s mid -term elections.
