Google Agrees to Pay Over Lawsuit for Deceptive Location Monitoring Practices

Google pays Washington state $39.9 million (almost Rs. 330 crore) to resolve a lawsuit accusing the Alphabet unit of deceptive shoppers about its location monitoring practices, state Legal professional Basic Bob Ferguson mentioned on Thursday.

The settlement resolves claims that Google deceived individuals into believing they managed how the search and promoting firm collected and used their private information.

In actuality, the state mentioned Google was capable of gather and revenue from that information even when shoppers disabled its monitoring know-how on their smartphones and computer systems, invading shoppers’ privateness.

A consent decree filed on Wednesday in King County Superior Court docket requires Google to be extra clear about its monitoring practices, and supply a extra detailed “Location Applied sciences” webpage describing them.

“Right now’s decision holds one of the highly effective firms accountable for its unethical and illegal techniques,” Ferguson mentioned in an announcement.

Google, primarily based in Mountain View, California, denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle.

In November, Google agreed to pay $391.5 million (almost Rs. 3,240 crore) to resolve related allegations by 40 US states.

Some states together with Washington selected to sue Google on their very own about its monitoring practices. Arizona reached an $85 million (almost Rs. 703 crore) settlement with Google final October in a kind of instances.

In response to the Washington settlement, Google referred to its earlier assertion on the multistate accord, the place it mentioned it had addressed numerous considerations raised by regulators, together with “outdated product insurance policies that we modified years in the past.”

© Thomson Reuters 2023