Google agreed to a $US391.5 ($584.27) million dollar settlement on Monday to end a lawsuit accusing the tech giant of tricking users with location data privacy settings that didn’t actually turn off data collection. The payout, the result of a suit brought by 40 state attorneys general, marks one of the biggest privacy settlements in history. Google also promised to make additional changes to clarify its location tracking practices next year.
“For years Google has prioritised profit over their users’ privacy,” said Ellen Rosenblum, Oregon’s attorney general who co-lead the case, in a press release. “They have 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 used that information for advertisers.”
The attorneys’ investigation into Google and subsequent lawsuit came after a 2018 report that found Google’s Location History setting didn’t stop the company’s location tracking, even though the setting promised that “with Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.” Google quickly updated the description of its settings, clarifying that you actually have to turn off a completely different setting called Web & App Activity if you want the company to stop following you around.
The mislabeled setting prompted four years of legal headaches for the Google. Last month, the company settled a different lawsuit with the Arizona state attorney general over the same issue for $US85 ($126) million, bringing the total Google will pay out over the problem to nearly half a billion dollars. The company faces even more lawsuits related to the problem with regulators in Washington, D.C., Indiana and Texas.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite waves of legal and media attention, Google’s location settings are still confusing, according to experts in interface design. The fine print makes it clear that you need to change multiple settings if you don’t want Google collecting data about everywhere you go, but you have to read carefully. It remains to be seen how clearly the changes the company promised in the settlement will communicate its data practices.
In the absence of any meaningful privacy rules at the federal level, a number of states passed their own privacy laws over the past few as concerns over data issues have entered the mainstream. California, Virginia, Illinois, and a number of other states now have general data protection rules, but even in those states, the rules are far from comprehensive.
There’s bipartisan support for a federal privacy law, the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, which the government came closer than ever to passing this year, but the bill failed to make it through Congress.
For now, regulators are forced to work with what they have. The one consumer protection rule that applies across the board is that companies aren’t allowed to trick you, and state and federal regulators have started coming after the tech industry for misleading people. Just last week, Apple was sued after Gizmodo exclusively reported that the company collects analytics data even after you turn off the iPhone Analytics privacy setting. Facebook dealt with similar legal troubles in a $US5 ($7.46) billion fine from the FTC, which found, among numerous other problems, that the social media company left millions of users unable to turn off facial recognition after promising that anyone could opt-out.