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 Photographs
Google agreed to pay practically $1.4 billion to the state of Texas to settle allegations of violating the information privateness rights of state residents, Texas Legal professional Normal Ken Paxton stated Friday.
Paxton sued Google in 2022 for allegedly unlawfully monitoring and amassing customers’ personal information.
The legal professional normal stated 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 comparable 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 common social media platforms.
“In Texas, Massive Tech just isn’t above the legislation,” Paxton stated in an announcement on Friday.
“For years, Google secretly tracked folks’s actions, personal searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry via their services and products. I fought again and received,” stated Paxton.
“This $1.375 billion settlement is a serious win for Texans’ privateness and tells firms that they are going to pay for abusing our belief.”
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda stated the corporate didn’t admit any wrongdoing or legal responsibility within the settlement. The deal covers 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 additionally stated Google doesn’t need to make any modifications to merchandise in reference to the settlement and that all the coverage modifications that the corporate made in reference to the allegations have been beforehand introduced or carried out.
“This settles a raft of outdated claims, lots of which have already been resolved elsewhere, regarding product insurance policies we have now lengthy since modified,” Castaneda stated.
“We’re happy to place them behind us, and we’ll proceed to construct strong privateness controls into our companies.”
