Google sued by 4 attorneys general over location tracking
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Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s CEO gestures at the World Economic Forum (WEF), annual meeting in Davos on January 22, 2020.
FABRICE COFFRINI – AFP | AFP | Getty Images
There are four general attorneys who represent the plaintiffs. GoogleTo allegedly lie to users regarding when company could track their location.
A bipartisan team of attorneys general representing the District of Columbia and Indiana claims in separate lawsuits that were filed Monday GoogleUsers were tricked into believing that the location history settings would be disabled and stop tracking them. This was from 2014 until 2019. But, the AGs allege, a user’s location could still be tracked by Google unless they also turned off settings in the Web & App Activity section.
Google describes Web & App Activity as a way to personalize experiences for users by saving searches and activity in a user’s account.
According to the AGs, Google misled its users into believing that their location could no longer be tracked once they had turned off their Location History.
The Washington lawsuit claims that Google recorded consumer’s locations using other methods, even though they had turned off location tracking. “lthough Web & App Activity setting is automatically enabled for all Google Accounts, the Company’s disclosures during Google Account creation did not mention or draw consumers’ attention to the setting until 2018.”
A 2018 report from the Associated PressThe lawsuits revealed the foundation of the accusations.
They claim that Google made a profit from this deception, by using such data to fuel its advertising campaign. In the lawsuits, the AGs request that the court order Google to release any algorithms it created from the allegedly illicit monetary and financial gains.
Google declined to immediately make a statement. However, it pointed out comments that a judge made in Arizona’s similar case.
In a filing recent to Location History, the judge stated that “a reasonable factfinder could discover that a reasonable or even an unsophisticated consumer understands that at minimum some location information are collected via means other than LH.”
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