Google settles lawsuit over facial recognition for 1.4 billion dollars
Texas and Google have been at loggerheads over data protection and privacy for years. Now an agreement has been reached without a ruling.
(Image: Skorzewiak/Shutterstock.com)
Because Google stored the location data or biometric data of two people without their consent, the company is paying the US state of Texas 1.375 billion US dollars. Google has thus reached an agreement in a legal dispute that has been ongoing since 2022 without a final judgment, as the responsible Attorney General Ken Paxton and Google announced on Friday. The amount of potential damages for those affected was not disclosed.
At the beginning of the dispute, the issues included voice recognition by the "Google Assistant" service and alleged continuous surveillance by the Nest cameras. Both parties had sued their way through the courts. At the center of the dispute was a Texas data protection law. In recent times, Google had repeatedly achieved successes before lower courts, as Bloomberg reports. Now, however, the company apparently wanted to get the matter off the table once and for all – Ken Paxton is an unpleasant opponent for the entire tech industry, having already settled a case against Meta with a similarly high fine.
"This settles a number of old claims, many of which have been resolved elsewhere and relate to product policies that we have long since changed," a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg. Nevertheless, according to the settlement, the company must now amend some of its terms and conditions. Google was also accused of continuing to store data even when users had opted out. This is said to have affected the search history, among other things.
Lawyers benefit
Bloomberg points out that the high fine could also be due to the fact that the state of Texas can also seek help from private law firms in such cases. Freedom of Information requests revealed that a law firm can receive 18 percent of the amount in the case of alleged unwarranted facial recognition, and 27 percent in the case of location data. In the USA, this type of percentage participation by law firms is common in private lawsuits for damages, among other things, if they pre-finance the costs of a legal dispute lasting years.
Independently of the current settlement, another case is also underway in Texas that accuses Google of illegally exploiting its dominant market position in online advertising. The first trial days are expected in August 2025.
(nie)
