Google sued by DC and three states for “deceptive” Android location monitoring

The attorneys common of three states and the District of Columbia are suing Google for the allegedly misleading assortment of location knowledge on Android. The complaints, which construct on a 2020 lawsuit filed by the Arizona Attorney General, allege that Google’s “complex web” of settings obfuscated whether or not customers had been sharing their location at a given second. Furthermore, they allege Google pushed Android customers with “repeated nudging, misleading pressure tactics, and evasive and deceptive descriptions” to share extra data both “inadvertently or out of frustration.”

“Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow customers to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access,” mentioned DC Attorney General Karl Racine in a press release. “The truth is that contrary to Google’s representations it continues to systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data.”

Racine’s swimsuit, filed at this time, accuses Google of violating DC’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act. State attorneys common from Washington, Texas, and Indiana are additionally submitting comparable fits in their very own jurisdictions.

The DC complaint claims that Google’s settings “purport to give consumers control over the location data Google collects and uses. But Google’s misleading, ambiguous, and incomplete descriptions of these settings all but guarantee that consumers will not understand when their location is collected and retained by Google or for what purposes.” Like the sooner lawsuit from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, the DC swimsuit attracts closely on a 2018 Associated Press report that discovered “many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.”

Reached for remark, Google denied the claims within the swimsuit, pointing to current adjustments like the power to auto-delete location historical past.

“The attorneys general are bringing a case based on inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings,” mentioned Google coverage spokesperson José Castañeda. “We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data.”

An Arizona decide, in the meantime, dealt a blow to the Arizona lawsuit final week by denying a request for abstract judgment, saying there wasn’t robust sufficient proof that Google had truly misled shoppers. The decide beneficial the case transfer ahead with a jury trial to resolve “a myriad of factual issues,” a path that Brnovich indicated he’ll pursue.