A Google company brand hangs above the doorway to the corporate’s workplace at St. John’s Terminal in New York Metropolis on March 11, 2025.
Gary Hershorn | Corbis Information | Getty Pictures
Google agreed to pay practically $1.4 billion to the state of Texas to settle allegations of violating information privateness rights of the state’s residents, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton mentioned Friday.
Paxton sued Google in 2022 for allegedly unlawfully monitoring and gathering the non-public information of customers. The lawyer common mentioned the settlement dwarfed all previous settlements by different states with Google for related information privateness violations.
Google’s settlement comes practically 10 months after the lawyer obtained a $1.4 billion settlement for Texas from Meta, the guardian firm of Fb and Instagram, to resolve claims of unauthorized use of biometric information by customers of these widespread social media platforms.
“In Texas, Massive Tech shouldn’t be above the regulation,” Paxton mentioned in a press release on Friday.
“For years, Google secretly tracked folks’s actions, non-public searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry by means of their services. I fought again and received,” mentioned Paxton. “This $1.375 billion settlement is a serious win for Texans’ privateness and tells firms that they may pay for abusing our belief.”
A spokesperson for Google mentioned, “This settles a raft of previous claims, lots of which have already been resolved elsewhere, regarding product insurance policies we now have lengthy since modified.”
“We’re happy to place them behind us, and we are going to proceed to construct strong privateness controls into our providers,” the spokesperson mentioned.
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