Why US states are suing Google over ‘deceptive’ location tracking
Attorneys general of four US states are suing Google for allegedly misleading users about when the company is able to track their location. The lawsuits are based on a 2018 report by news agency The Associated Press.
The bipartisan group of AGs from the District of Columbia, Indiana, Texas and Washington allege in separate lawsuits 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.
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A Google spokesperson said the lawsuits are “based on inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings”. Google said it has “always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data”.
An AP report revealed the basis of the allegations in the lawsuits.
Arizona’s attorney general brought a similar lawsuit in 2020, but D.C. AG Karl Racine said in an interview the new lawsuits are distinct in part because they include a focus on so-called dark patterns, which are design choices websites use to steer users towards a certain decision. The lawsuit said that examples of dark patterns “include complicated navigation menus, visual misdirection, confusing wording (such as double negatives), and repeated nudging”.
Racine said it was important to include dark patterns in the complaint “because it shows the level of deception and the level of intention that many companies including Google, engage in to essentially trap the user limit the user’s ability to keep certain areas of their life private. And they do it all the while telling the user in their policy statements, that the user is in control of how the system their system operates. That couldn’t be farther from the truth”.
The AGs allege that Google profited from the deception by fuelling its advertising business with such data. The lawsuits specifically request the court to require Google to offload any algorithms created with the allegedly ill-gotten gains, alongside monetary profits.
The request for algorithms to be included in the prayer for relief is relatively unique, but Racine said it was an important one to deter other companies from pursuing similar types of alleged deception.
“If you have gotten access to a whole body of information that you clearly have programmed and made an algorithm to profit from, I would suggest that that is ascertainable information,” Racine said. “And therefore, we should figure out how much money Google has made using, in this case, D.C. user data on geolocation. Because we’d like to have that money back.”
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“The attorneys general are bringing a case based on inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement. “We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data. We will vigorously defend ourselves and set the record straight.”
Castañeda added that the Alphabet-owned search giant has updated the way it stores and communicates to users about location settings, including by letting users automatically delete location data on a regular basis beginning in June 2019. In June 2020, it made auto-delete the default for new accounts. The company also has made changes to limit the way it collects location data when users search on Google, to collect the general area a user is searching from rather than a precise location.
Turning Off ‘Location History’
- Go to the Settings app on your Android device and tap on ‘Google’. On iOS, go to the Google app and tap on your profile picture
- Select the ‘Manage your Google Account’ option
- Tap on ‘Data and Privacy’. In the Activity controls section, tap ‘Location History’
- Switch off Location History by swiping left
