1d ago

Google will pay Texas $1.4B to settle claims the company collected users' data without permission

Attorney General Ken Paxton described the settlement as sending a message to tech companies that he will not allow them to make money off of “selling away our rights and freedoms.”

“In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law.” Paxton said in a statement. “For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won.”

The agreement settles several claims Texas made against the search giant in 2022 related to geolocation, incognito searches and biometric data. The state argued Google was “unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data.”

8 comments

1.4B for big tech companies seems like 100$ for them.
I'm sure Google will manage to get back their 1.4B in short time effortlessly

Nice, but who will get that money? Will it get "distributed" among "users" that had their data stolen? Yea, didnt think so.
- This seems like they just bought that data from the government

Shouldn't they be paying the people who's info was stolen?
They have their deets, just send everyone cash

And most of that wont go to the people effected anyway.

If they were not above the law, then this would have been a criminal prosecution of Google executives that would not be escapable via large payoffs.
- Payoffs that won’t include divulging the extent of the damage.

How much do you want to bet that 1.4b is less than a tenth of the profits they accrued from all of the data theft and spying? In that extremely likely case, this is just a cost of doing business expense that will do nothing to deter any of the major offenders such as Google itself, Facebook, and Twitter.
They should be fined over half of the estimated income resulting from their illegal bullshit and the executives responsible should face personal legal jeopardy. Anything less is just posturing and fake accountability.

8 comments