Google will pay the state of Texas $1.375 billion to resolve two privacy lawsuits claiming the tech giant tracks Texans’ personal location and maintains their facial recognition data, both without there consent, Bloomberg Law reported.
Google announced the settlement Friday, ending yearslong battles with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over the state’s strict laws on user data.
“This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” said Google spokesperson José Castañeda. “We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.”
The settlement rivals the $1.4 billion Meta opted to pay Texas last year to resolve facial recognition claims involving its Facebook and Instagram platforms. That agreement, which involved just one case, was the largest ever obtained from a suit by a single state.
The two billion dollar settlements are part of a broader war against Big Tech by Paxton, who has touted his wins in a bid to challenge John Cornyn for US Senate. Paxton’s office has pending privacy or deceptive trade practices claims against TikTok Inc., Allstate Corp, and General Motors LLC.
Attorney General of Texas Ken Paxton reported: Attorney General Ken Paxton secured a $1.375 billion settlement in principle with Google, delivering a historic win for Texans’ data privacy and security rights and marking the highest recovery nationwide against Google for any attorney general’s enforcement of state privacy laws.
In 2022, Attorney General Paxton sued Google for unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data. After years of aggressive litigation, Attorney General Paxton agreed to settle Texas’s data-privacy claims against Google for an amount that far surpasses any other state’s claims for similar violations.
To date, no state has attained a settlement against Google for similar data-privacy violations grater than $93 million. Even a multistage coalition that included forty states secured just $391 billion – almost a billion dollars less than Texas’ recovery.
The Verge reported: Google is set to pay $1.375 billion to settle claims of data privacy violations brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, according to a press release.
Texas filed two lawsuits in 2022 against Google for “unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data,” the release says. Before now, no single state has “attained a settlement against Google for similar data-privacy violations greater than $93 million.
“This settles a raft of old claims, many of which already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product polices we have long since changed.” Google spokesperson José Castañeda tells The Verge. “We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.”