Four U.S. federal prosecutors are seeking to sue Google, alleging the company used a ruse to force users to provide location data and then profit from it. Following a previous lawsuit against Google over location tracking, a group of U.S. attorneys general filed a joint lawsuit in the District of Columbia, Texas, Washington and Indiana.
According to the Washington Post, the District of Columbia Attorney General Karl A. Racine said the courts are the best place to deal with Big Tech. When you file a lawsuit, they can’t lobby the judge, he said. So we’re going to take it to court. Google is constantly seeking to track a user’s location using subterfuge, Racine continued.
Gone are the days of subterfuge for profit. This lawsuit, brought on a bipartisan basis by four attorneys general, is long-overdue enforcement action against a man who blatantly violated privacy and the laws of our states. The lawsuit alleges that Google uses tricks to continually seek to track the location of users. It claims the company pressured users to leave tracking settings inadvertently or out of frustration.
Google’s misleading, vague and incomplete description of these settings all but guarantees that consumers will not know when their location is collected and retained by Google, or for what purpose, and, in reality, Regardless of the setting they choose, consumers using Google products have no choice but to allow the company to collect, store and use their location.
The Washington Post reported that previous lawsuits over these issues had recently been met with skepticism by a judge. In January 2022, Judge Timothy J. Thomason ruled that the case had issues of fact that must be resolved by trial.
We’ve been building privacy features into our products and providing strong controls for location data. We look forward to clarifying the facts, Google spokesman Jose Castaneda told The Washington Post. Both Google and Apple have previously taken steps to protect users’ location privacy, including banning an app that sold data to the U.S. military.