Four attorneys general are suing Google for allegedly misleading users about when the company was able to track their location.
The bipartisan group of attorneys general from the District of Columbia, Indiana, Texas and Washington allege in separate lawsuits filed Monday that Google deceived users from at least 2014 to 2019 by leading them to believe that turning off “location history” settings would make the service stop tracking their whereabouts. But, the AGs allege, a user’s location could still be tracked by Google unless they also turned off settings in the “Web & App Activity” section.
The AGs allege that Google misled users to believe that once they turned their location history off, their whereabouts would no longer be tracked.
“Yet, even when consumers explicitly opted out of location tracking by turning ‘location history’ off, Google nevertheless recorded consumers’ locations via other means,” the Washington lawsuit alleges. “Although Web & App Activity setting is automatically enabled for all Google accounts, the company’s disclosures during ‘Google Account’ creation did not mention or draw consumers’ attention to the setting until 2018,” the suit charges.
Authored by Lauren Feiner via CNBC
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