Google agreed to pay $ 1.4 billion to the state of Texas on Friday to arrange two lawsuits that follow the accusing of the privacy of state residents by following their locations and searches, as well as collecting their information about face recognition.
The Attorney General of the State, Ken Paxton, who has protected the settlement, brought the lawsuits under the laws of Texas with regard to data privacy and misleading commercial practices in 2022. Less than a year ago he reached a settlement of $ 1.4 billion with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, about accusations that it had illegally tagged the faces of users on his site.
Google's settlement is the latest legal setback for the tech giant. In the past two years, Google has lost a series of antitrust cases after he found a monopoly about the App Store, search engine and advertising technology. It has spent the past three weeks in the search to ward off an US government request to split its activities.
“Big Tech is not above the law,” Mr. Paxton said in a statement.
José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, said that the company had already changed its product policy. “This establishes a series of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere,” he said.
Privacy issues have become an important source of tension between technical giants and supervisors in recent years. In the absence of federal privacy legislation, states such as Texas and Washington have adopted laws to curb the collection of facial, voice and other biometric data.
Google and Meta are the best profitable companies that have been challenged according to those laws. The law of Texas, Capture or the use of biometric identification requires that companies request permission before they use functions such as face recognition technologies. The law applies the state to impose damage of a maximum of $ 25,000 per violation.
The lawsuit was brought under that law aimed at the Google photos app, so that people could search for photos of a certain person; The next camera from Google, who could send warnings when it recognized visitors at a door; And Google Assistant, a virtual assistant who can learn a maximum of six voices from users and answer their questions.
Mr. Paxton has filed a separate lawsuit that accused Google of misleading Texans by keeping their personal location data, even after they thought they had disabled that position. He added a complaint to that lawsuit and claimed that the private browsing institution of Google, which called the Incognito mode, was not really private. Those cases were brought under the Texas' Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
