Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sued Google on Wednesday, alleging the tech giant violated its users’ privacy by collecting information about their location even if they had turned off there location tracking and also seems to profit from such act .
The suit alleges Google violated the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act and it seeks to retrieve back profits from the tracking.
“When consumers try to opt out of Google’s collection of location data, the company is continuing to find misleading ways to obtain information and use it for profit,” Brnovich said while been interviewed .
Jose Castaneda, a spokesman for Google, defending the company’s privacy practices in a statement, stressing the state and its “contingency fee lawyers filing this lawsuit appear to have mischaracterized our services."
“We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data. We look forward to setting the record straight,” he said.
By Arizona’s Analysis , Google’s “seemingly relentless drive” to collect location data simultaneously which helped the tech giant deliver targeted ads to Arizona residents who may not have consented to such tracking in the first place. To that occurrence, Brnovich asked a court to require Google to pay back illegal profits from its alleged misdeeds, which may be estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, the attorney general said. State anti-fraud laws also allow Arizona to obtain up to $10,000 per violation.
“Users, including in Arizona, have come to rely on Google’s products and services on a daily basis,” the state’s complaint contends. “At the same time, through these deceptive and unfair acts and practices, Google makes it impractical if not impossible for users to meaningfully opt-out of Google’s collection of location information, should the users seek to do so.”
Google and its YouTube subsidiary, as well as the other major tech companies, are facing a number of regulatory and legal quagmires right now, following antitrust and privacy enforcement in the European Union that resulted in multi-billion fines against Google over the last decade.
YouTube settled with the FTC last year for violations of Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), while Google is currently under investigation by all 50 state attorneys general and the subject of a broader antitrust probe led by the Justice Department.
No comments:
Post a Comment