Google agreed to pay $ 1.375 billion in the state of Texas to settle two prosecution accusing the company to follow the personal location of users, incognito research and vocal and facial data without their permission.
The prosecution was brought by the Attorney General of Texas Ken Paxton in 2022. The Facebook Meta parent company agreed to pay a similar amount to settle a lawsuit linked to Paxton’s facial recognition last year.
“In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law,” Paxton said in a statement. “For years, Google has secretly followed people’s movements, private research and even their vocal footprints and their facial geometry through their products and services. I retaliated and won.”
Paxton’s office also said it was the “highest recovery on a national level against Google for the application by the Attorney General of the Laws on the Privacy of States”.
A Google spokesperson said that the company is paying prosecution without any admission of reprehensible acts or responsibility, and without having to modify any of its products.
“This settles a series of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning the product policies that we have changed for a long time,” spokesman José Castañeda said in a statement. “We are happy to put them behind us, and we will continue to integrate robust confidentiality checks into our services.”
Google won some previous victories in these prosecution, for example with a court of the Court of Appeal that the company has no sufficient links in Texas to deal with a trial. The company had initially answered by claiming that Paxton put its products “in another breath trial” – for example, said that Google Photos only scanned the faces of users in order to group similar photos and that it had not used the feature for advertising.
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The regulations come after major antitrust decisions noting that Google has acted illegally to maintain monopolies in web research and advertising technology, with remedies offered, in particular the divestment of Chrome. (Google said it would appeal from the two decisions.)
Paxton, on the other hand, recently announced that he would challenge the American senator John Cornyn in the mid-term elections next year.
