Google agreed to pay $ 1.4 billion in Texas to settle complaints that the company collected user data without authorization, the State Attorney General said on Friday.
Jeff Chiu / AP
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Jeff Chiu / AP
Google will pay $ 1.4 billion in Texas to settle the complaints that the company has collected user data without authorization, the State Prosecutor General announced on Friday.
The Attorney General Ken Paxton described the settlement as sending a message to technological companies that he will not allow them to earn money to “sell our rights and freedoms”.
“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.”
The Agreement regulates several Texas claims against the research giant in 2022 concerning geolocation, incognito research and biometric data. The state argued that Google “followed illegally and illegally collected private user data”.
Paxton said, for example, that Google had collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voice fingerprints and facial geometry recordings, via products and services such as Google Photos and Google Assistant.
Google’s spokesperson José Castañeda said the agreement settles a range of “old affirmations”, some of which concern the products of products that the company has already changed.
“We are happy to put them behind us, and we will continue to establish robust confidentiality checks in our services,” he said in a statement.
The company also specified that the regulations do not require any change of product.
Paxton said the $ 1.4 billion is the largest amount earned by any state in a regulation with Google for this type of data privilege violations.
Texas previously reached two other key regulations with Google in the past two years, one of which in December 2023 in which the company has agreed to pay $ 700 million and make several other dealerships to settle allegations that it had stifled the competition against its Android App Store store.
Meta also accepted a settlement of $ 1.4 billion with Texas in a confidentiality trial concerning allegations that the technology giant used biometric data of users without their permission.
