Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is suing Google in an effort to change how the company handles users’ personal data.
Ferguson joined attorneys general in Texas, Indiana and the District of Columbia in filing a lawsuit Monday alleging the company misled consumers about its location-tracking services and, at times, collected data without their consent.
In Washington, Ferguson is asking the court to tell Google to change its practices, give up the data it acquired and take back the profits it made from using those tactics in the first place — as well as a $7,500 fee for each violation.
“Location data is deeply personal for consumers,” he said. “Google denied consumers the ability to choose whether [it] could track their sensitive location data to make a profit. Google kept tracking individuals’ location data even after consumers told the corporation to stop.
“This is not only dishonest — it’s unlawful.”
In the lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court, Ferguson claims Google violated the state’s Consumer Protection Act by collecting, storing and using consumers’ location data without their knowledge or consent and, in some cases, directly against their intent.
It’s not yet clear how many Washingtonians were impacted by Google’s practices but the attorney general’s office estimates there could be “hundreds of thousands of potential violations.”
State law requires that any penalties Google pays as a result of violations to the Consumer Protection Act will go to the general fund, Ferguson said.
Google isn’t the only company that has been accused of using misleading messages to collect data from users, which can be a way to sell more advertising, said Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that focuses on digital privacy and free speech.
But it is one of the most influential.
“There’s no one else who does it at the scale that Google does, and there’s no one else that has all the different inroads into your life that Google does,” Cyphers said.
Google says location data plays an important role in providing useful and meaningful experiences to consumers, according to its website. The data is used for things like directions on Google Maps, making sure websites are shown in the right language and telling consumers what restaurants are nearby — and how crowded they typically are at any given time.
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Google began releasing anonymous and aggregated reports to track where people were going, and where they were not, to help remediate the impact of the virus. For example, in Washington last week, visits to grocery stores and pharmacies were down 10% compared to a baseline and visits to parks were up 14%.
Google can track someone’s location from real-time signals, like an IP address or a device’s location, as well as using past activity on Google sites and services.
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