Google has agreed to pay $4.4 billion to the state of Texas to resolve two lawsuits alleging that it had violated the privacy of Texans by collecting their facial recognition data and tracking their searches and locations.
The lawsuits were filed in 2022 under Texas laws pertaining to data privacy and unfair trade practices by the state's attorney general, Ken Paxton, who was responsible for securing the settlement.
He reached a copy.4 billion deal with Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, less than a year ago over claims that the firm had unlawfully tagged users' faces on its website.
Google's payment is the company's most recent legal setback. Google has lost a number of antitrust trials in the last two years after it was discovered that it had a monopoly on its search engine, app store, and advertising technology.
In the search case, it has been attempting to resist a request from the US government to disband its operations for the last three weeks.
In recent years, privacy concerns have emerged as a key point of contention between regulators and internet corporations.
States like Texas and Washington have enacted legislation to restrict the collecting of facial, voice, and other biometric data in the absence of a federal privacy law.
The most well-known businesses that have been contested under those regulations are Google and Meta. The Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier statute in Texas mandates that businesses obtain consent before utilizing features like voice or facial recognition technology. According to the statute, the state may fine a person up to $25,000.
Google's Next camera, which could send alerts when it recognized visitors at a door, the Google Photos app, which let users search for photos of a specific person, and Google Assistant, a virtual assistant that could learn the voices of up to six users and respond to their inquiries, were the main targets of the lawsuit brought under that law.
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In a different complaint, Paxton claimed that Google had deceived Texans by continuing to follow their location data even after they believed they had turned off the service. In that lawsuit, he filed a complaint, claiming that Google's secret browsing option, known as Incognito mode, was not truly private. The Deceptive Trade Practices Act of Texas was the legal basis for those cases.