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Google has agreed to a $391.5m (£333m) settlement with 40 states investigating how the company tracks users’ locations, state attorneys general have announced.
They called it the largest multistate privacy agreement in U.S. history.
The state investigations were sparked by a 2018 report by the Associated Press (AP) that found that Google continued to track people’s location data even when they opted out of such tracking, officials said.
“This $391.5 million settlement is a historic victory for consumers in an age of increasing reliance on technology,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement.
“Location data is some of the most sensitive and valuable personal information Google collects, and there are many reasons why consumers can opt out of tracking.”
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., said it addressed these issues several years ago.
“Based on the improvements we’ve made in recent years, we’ve resolved this investigation based on an outdated product policy we changed years ago,” company spokesman Jose Castaneda said in a statement.
The Associated Press reports that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data, even if you use a privacy setting that says it prevents Google from doing so.
At the request of The Associated Press, computer science researchers at Princeton University confirmed the findings.
Storing such data poses privacy risks and has been used by police to locate suspects.
The Associated Press reported in 2018 that location-tracking privacy concerns affect roughly 2 billion device users running Google’s Android operating system and the hundreds of millions of iPhone users around the world who rely on Google for maps or searches.
Attorneys general investigating Google say a key part of the company’s digital advertising business is location data, which they say is the most sensitive and valuable personal data the company collects.
Even small amounts of location data can reveal a person’s identity and day-to-day life, they say.
State officials say Google uses location information to target ads to consumers.
The attorney general said Google violated state consumer protection laws by misleading users about its location-tracking practices since at least 2014.
As part of the settlement, Google also agreed to make these practices more transparent to users, including showing them more information when they turn location account settings on and off, and maintaining a webpage that provides users with information about the data Google collects.
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