A Google company emblem 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 Photographs
Google agreed to pay practically $1.4 billion to the state of Texas to settle allegations of violating the info privateness rights of state residents, Texas Lawyer Normal Ken Paxton mentioned Friday.
Paxton sued Google in 2022 for allegedly unlawfully monitoring and accumulating the non-public information of customers.
The legal professional common mentioned the settlement, which covers allegations in two separate lawsuits towards the search engine and app big, dwarfed all previous settlements by different states with Google for related information privateness violations.
Google’s settlement comes practically 10 months after Paxton obtained a $1.4 billion settlement for Texas from Meta, the mother or father firm of Fb and Instagram, to resolve claims of unauthorized use of biometric information by customers of these fashionable social media platforms.
“In Texas, Huge Tech just isn’t above the legislation,” 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 their services and products. I fought again and gained,” mentioned Paxton.
“This $1.375 billion settlement is a serious win for Texans’ privateness and tells corporations that they’ll pay for abusing our belief.”
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda mentioned the corporate didn’t admit any wrongdoing or legal responsibility within the settlement, which entails allegations associated to the Chrome browser’s incognito setting, disclosures associated to location historical past on the Google Maps app, and biometric claims associated to Google Picture.
Castaneda mentioned Google doesn’t must make any adjustments to merchandise in reference to the settlement and that the entire coverage adjustments that the corporate made in reference to the allegations have been beforehand introduced or carried out.
“This settles a raft of previous claims, a lot of which have already been resolved elsewhere, regarding product insurance policies we’ve got lengthy since modified,” Castaneda mentioned.
“We’re happy to place them behind us, and we’ll proceed to construct sturdy privateness controls into our providers.”
