Hands holding a mobile phone showing Google location tracking lawsuit

Google Settles Washington Location Tracking Lawsuit for $39.9 Million

Washington is the latest state in which Google has settled a location tracking lawsuit, adding to a list that has cost it a little over half a billion dollars to date.

The Washington settlement will add $39.9 million to the running total in the United States, which includes $391.5 million for a joint lawsuit involving 40 states and $85 million in Arizona. The suits date back to a 2018 probe that found Google apps and services were continuing to track and log location data even after users had changed settings that seemed to expressly prevent this.

Google location tracking tab continues to rise even as company denies wrongdoing

The lawsuits alleged that Google apps continued to collect location tracking data even after Android device users had reasonable cause to believe they had disabled this via privacy settings. The large settlement totals are owed in part to this having been an issue since at least 2014. Prior lawsuits have established that Google must also automatically delete location data after it is held for a certain period of time, change its disclosures and tools to be more transparent and make it easier to delete stored personal data, and create a more detailed “Location Technologies” webpage that makes its tracking practices more clear.

Google continues to deny wrongdoing in these cases, but has proven willing to settle for large amounts. The company maintains that the bulk of the problems stem from “outdated” product policies that it claims to have changed years ago.

The Washington suit additionally alleged that Google employs unfair and deceptive “nudges” in its attempts to convince users to enable location tracking. One example cited by the suit is found in the setup process for apps such as Assistant and Maps, which made claims that the service “needed” or “depended” on access to location history to function. This is not true. The prompts would also continue repeatedly throughout use of various Google products after the user initially opted out of location tracking. The “nudge” prompts also sometimes tout benefits to users, but do not mention that Google makes money off of this tracking via targeted advertising.

Persistent location tracking suits force some Android changes, but not a complete overhaul

The location tracking lawsuits have compelled Google to make a number of changes, and to its credit it has made several voluntarily in the name of improved user privacy. However, one of the central points of contention of these lawsuits remains in place. The easily-missed “Web and App Activity” setting remains on by default, and will collect location tracking and a variety of personal information until it is disabled.

The money that Google has already paid in settlements tends to go to general funds for state government, and the $39.9 million it will be sending to Washington will go into a fund used specifically for enforcement of the state’s Consumer Protection Act. More location tracking penalties appear to be on the way, however. In Texas, the Attorney General has announced that Google will pay $8 million in a settlement involving Pixel 4 ads it ran about three to four years ago. The nationwide radio ad campaign featured DJs that gave personal testimonials about their use of the phone, which turned out to be entirely fabricated; the DJs had never so much as touched the devices. These ads cost Google an additional $9 million in a separate settlement with the FTC and a number of state attorneys general.

And the company is not just racking up fines in the US. Though the majority of the amount is owed to antitrust violations, Google has now paid over €8 billion in penalties in the EU. It holds one of the largest individual General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) fines, issued by France due to failure to obtain appropriate consent for collecting and processing user data (including location tracking information) and not providing clear and accessible privacy statements. The company has also been under investigation in the EU since 2020 for its location tracking practices, along similar lines to the complaints brought in the various US lawsuits. The probe is examining whether consent to tracking is truly “freely given” as stipulated by the GDPR, or if the language used to obtain permission is deceptive or misleading.

Google is also yet to face its major antitrust battle in the US, with the case brought by the Department of Justice not expected to go to trial until late 2023. The company (along with many other social media platforms) received a win on Section 230 protections with a recent Supreme Court decision, however, with the issue not likely to be up for debate again any time soon unless Congress opts to act on it.