Doina and David Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Texas and the District of Columbia sued Alphabet (NASDAQ:) Inc’s Google on Monday over what he called deceptive location tracking practices that invade users’ privacy.

Washington, D.C. Attorney-General Karl Racine said that the office of two additional state attorneys general plans to file lawsuits along with a bipartisan effort, to hold Google responsible for privacy violations.

Racine claimed that Google mislead consumers into believing that they could change their settings and protect their privacy to limit the amount of personal data it had access.

“The truth is that contrary to Google’s representations it continues to systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data. Google’s bold misrepresentations are a clear violation of consumers’ privacy.”

Jose Castaneda from Google spokesmen said, “attorneys in general are bringing a claim based upon inaccurate claims and outdated assertions concerning our settings.” Our products have been built with privacy features and provide robust controls to protect location data. “We will defend ourselves vigorously and correct the record.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that Google had misled users by continuing to track them even after they tried to opt out.

Google has a “Location History” setting and informs users if they turn it off “the places you go are no longer stored,” Texas said.

Google “continues to track users’ location through other settings and methods that it fails to adequately disclose,” Texas said.

Arizona sued Google in May 2020 over the collection of user location data. The suit is still pending.