Google and privacy are two words that are constantly associated, but not always for the best reasons. A scenario that has just been repeated with the American company facing legal proceedings for this matter.
The complaint was filed by the attorney general of the US state of Washington DC. Once again, it is Google’s location tracking practices that raise legal questions.
They accuse Google of not erasing the location of users even if they request it
At the origin of this legal action is Google’s disloyalty towards users and their location data. Although the company promotes the possibility for users to disable this feature, the company is accused of keeping it active.
That is, Karl Racine claims that Google continues to monitor the location of its users even when they revoke that permission. This is a potentially harmful act for the user and a violation of one of the consumer protection laws in that state.
“Google leads consumers to believe that they have control over whether Google collects and retains information about their location and how that information is used. In reality, consumers who use Google products cannot prevent Google from collecting, storing and profiting from of your location.”
This US attorney general goes further and claims that Google guides its consumers down dark paths. The idea is that they consent to this data collection, something that they consider harmful to users.
This is not the first time that Google has been embroiled in a controversy over its practices regarding location data. In 2018, an Associated Press reporter reported that the location remained active regardless of the user’s decision.
To date, this journalist assured that between 2014 and 2019 that information remained stored in a database. While Google does indeed make it easy to erase this data, the process is not accessible.
More recently, in 2020, a lawsuit was filed in the state of Arizona for Google to reimburse users for advertising revenue. A request motivated again by the false belief that they have this option disabled.