Google He will pay $ 1.4 billion to Texas to liquidate claims that the company compiled user data without permission, the State Attorney announced on Friday.
Attorney General Ken Paxton described the agreement as sending a message to technology companies that will not allow them to make money with “selling 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 voice footprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I went and won.”
The agreement resolves several claims that Texas made against the giant of the search in 2022 related to geolocation, incognito searches and biometric data. The State argued that Google was “illegally tracking and collecting the private data of users.”
Paxton said, for example, that Google compiled millions of biometric identifiers, including voice footprints and facial geometry records, through products and services such as Google Photos and Google Assistant.
Google spokesman José Castañeda said the agreement resolves a variety of “old claims”, some of which are related to the products policies that the company has already changed.
“We are pleased to leave them behind, and we will continue to generate solid privacy controls in our services,” he said in a statement.
The company also clarified that the agreement does not require any new change of the product.
Paxton said that the $ 1.4 billion is the largest amount won by any state in an agreement with Google on this type of data privacy violations.
Texas previously reached two other key settlements with Google in the last two years, including one in December 2023 in which the company agreed to pay $ 700 million and make several other concessions to resolve accusations that he had been suffocating the competition against his Android application store.
Goal also agreed $ 1.4 billion Texas settlement In a privacy demand on accusations that the technological giant used the biometric data of users without their permission.
