Google agreed to pay $ 1.4 billion to the state of Texas on Friday to resolve two demands that accused him of violating the privacy of state residents when tracking their locations and searches, as well as collecting their facial recognition information.
The State Attorney General Ken Paxton, who assured the agreement, brought the demands in 2022 under the laws of Texas related to the privacy of data and deceptive commercial practices. Less than a year ago, it reached an agreement of $ 1.4 billion with goal, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, about the accusations that it had illegally labeled the faces of the users in place.
The Google agreement is the last legal setback for the technological giant. Around the last two years, Google has lost a series of antitrust cases after it is discovered that it has the monopoly on its application store, search engines and advertising technology. He has spent the last three weeks in the case of searching trying to defend himself from a requirement of the United States government to break his business.
“The great technology is not above the law,” Paxton said in a statement.
José Castañeda, a Google spokesman, said the company had already changed its product policies. “This resolves a series of old statements, many of which have already resolved the leg to there,” he said.
Privacy problems have become an important source of tension between technological giants and regulators in recent years. In the absence of a Federal Privacy Law, states such as Texas and Washington have approved laws to stop the compilation of facial, voice and others biometric data.
Google and Meta have been the challenge of the highest profile companies under those laws. The Texas Law, called Biometric Capture or Use or Identifier, requires that companies request permission before using characteristics such as facial or voice recognition technologies. The law allows the State to impose damage of up to $ 25,000 per violation.
The demand filed under that law focused on the Google Photos application, which allowed people to look for photos of a particular person; The next Google camera, which could send alerts when it recognized visitors at a door; and Google Assistant, a virtual assistant who could learn to the voices of six users and answer their questions.
Mr. Paxton filed a separate lawsuit that accused Google of making Texans failures when tracking his personal location data, just after they thought they had disabled that function. He added a complaint to that demand claiming that Google’s private navigation configuration, which called the unknown mode, was really private. These cases were presented under the Law on Commercial Practices of Texas Trade.
