Google agreed to pay the state of Texas $ 1.375 billion to solve two legal causes by accusing the company of monitoring the personal position of users, unknown searches and vocal and facial data without their authorization.
The causes were intended by the Prosecutor General of Texas Ken Paxton in 2022
“In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law,” Paxton said in a note. “For years, Google has secretly tracked down people’s movements, private research and even their vocal footprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I reacted and won.”
The PAXTON office also stated that it is the “highest recovery at national level against Google for any application by the Prosecutor General of State Privacy Laws”.
A Google spokesman said that the company is solving the causes without any admission of offenses or responsibilities and without having to change any of its products.
“This resolves a series of old statements, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning the policies of the product that we have changed for some time,” said the spokesman José Castañeda in a note. “We are pleased to put them behind and we will continue to create solid privacy checks in our services.”
Google has won some previous victories in these seeds, for example with a sentence of the Court of Appeal that the company does not have sufficient links with Texas to face a case there. The company had initially replied by saying that Paxton erroneously characterized its products “in another breathless cause” – for example, the company said that Google Photo has scanned only the faces of users to group similar photos together and that it did not use the function for advertising.
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The settlement comes after the important antitrust sentences that discovered that Google has acted illegally to keep monopolies in the research on the web and in advertising technology, with proposed remedies including the transfer of Chrome. (Google said he will appeal to both sentences.)
In the meantime, Paxton has recently announced that he will challenge the United States Senator John Cornyn in the medium -term elections next year.
