Google has agreed to pay 40 US states a total of $391.5 million to end an investigation into its contentious location-tracking practices.Ellen Rosenblum, the attorney general of Oregon, who oversaw negotiations with Doug Peterson, the attorney general of Nebraska, said that Google will “substantially improve” its location tracking and user management disclosures beginning in 2019. He has plans to achieve that.
In spite of the fact that he believed consumers had disabled location tracking, Rosenblum admitted in an interview that he had been secretly tracking user movements for years and sharing the information with advertisers. “Cunning and misleading” was used to describe Google’s tactics.
“There’s no denying what they did,” Rosenblum said. We can put controls in place to make it more difficult to do,” he added. Such data could be used by prosecutors to track women’s movements and defeat state bans, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to overturn abortion rights.
Among the concerns, the topic of location became a particularly sensitive issue. Google has previously said it will automatically delete records of users’ visits to sensitive locations, including abortion clinics, in response to concerns.
the multistate investigation was sparked by a 2018 Associated Press article that Google said, “Even if you specifically don’t record your movements, The state cites two Google account setting issues: location history and web and app activity.