Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is suing Google in an
effort to change how the company handles users’ personal data.

Ferguson joined attorneys general in Texas, Indiana and the District
of Columbia in filing a lawsuit Monday alleging the company misled
consumers about its location-tracking services and, at times,
collected data without their consent.

In Washington, Ferguson is asking the court to tell Google to change
its practices, give up the data it acquired and take back the
profits it made from using those tactics in the first place — as
well as a $7,500 fee for each violation.

“Location data is deeply personal for consumers,” he said. “Google
denied consumers the ability to choose whether [it] could track
their sensitive location data to make a profit. Google kept tracking
individuals’ location data even after consumers told the corporation
to stop.

“This is not only dishonest — it’s unlawful.”

In the lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court, Ferguson claims
Google violated the state’s Consumer Protection Act by collecting,
storing and using consumers’ location data without their knowledge
or consent and, in some cases, directly against their intent.

It’s not yet clear how many Washingtonians were impacted by Google’s
practices but the attorney general’s office estimates there could be
“hundreds of thousands of potential violations.”

State law requires that any penalties Google pays as a result of
violations to the Consumer Protection Act will go to the general
fund, Ferguson said.

Google isn’t the only company that has been accused of using
misleading messages to collect data from users, which can be a way
to sell more advertising, said Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist
at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit based in San
Francisco that focuses on digital privacy and free speech.

But it is one of the most influential.

“There’s no one else who does it at the scale that Google does, and
there’s no one else that has all the different inroads into your
life that Google does,” Cyphers said.

Google says location data plays an important role in providing
useful and meaningful experiences to consumers, according to its
website. The data is used for things like directions on Google Maps,
making sure websites are shown in the right language and telling
consumers what restaurants are nearby — and how crowded they
typically are at any given time.

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Google began releasing
anonymous and aggregated reports to track where people were going,
and where they were not, to help remediate the impact of the virus.
For example, in Washington last week, visits to grocery stores and
pharmacies were down 10% compared to a baseline and visits to parks
were up 14%.

Google can track someone’s location from real-time signals, like an
IP address or a device’s location, as well as using past activity on
Google sites and services.

In recent years, the company says it has made improvements to make
location data easy to manage and understand while also minimizing
the amount of data stored.

It launched an Incognito mode for Google Maps to allow users to
browse or get directions without saving information to their Google
account. And it set up an auto-delete default for all new Google
accounts that will automatically delete any activity data older than
18 months.

“The attorneys general are bringing a case based on inaccurate
claims and outdated assertions about our settings,” said José
Castañeda, a Google spokesperson. “We will vigorously defend
ourselves and set the record straight.”

The complaints lodged Monday come after a 2018 report from The
Associated Press that found many Google services on Android devices
and iPhones stored users’ location data even if the consumer enabled
a privacy setting that said it would prevent Google from doing so.

Washington, D.C., opened an investigation into the company in 2018.
And in 2020, Arizona’s attorney general filed a lawsuit arguing that
the company set up its Android mobile operating system in a way that
enriched its advertising empire and deceived users about the
protections afforded to their personal data.

The case in Arizona made it clear Google didn’t have a “real
infrastructure or a real plan” for handling user’s requests to turn
location tracking off, said Jennifer King, a privacy and data policy
fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial
Intelligence.

“I’m inclined to argue that they had no interest in creating
products that assumed you did not want to be tracked by them,” she
said. “I don’t think its incompetence or accidental as much as it
was just not a priority.”

Along with tracking Android devices even after users turn off
location access and collecting location data after users disable
“location history,” the lawsuit alleges Google repeatedly “nudges”
users to consent to location tracking.

Those nudges could come in the form of a pop-up box alerting a user
that a service like Google Maps won’t work as well if the user opts
to turn off location tracking. That pop-up box is misleading,
according to both Ferguson and King.

The map could still perform its main function — getting a user from
one address to another, she said. It just might not be able to point
you to the closest fast-food joint.

“They were trying to make it sound as if you were somehow suffering
from a depleted user experience because they wouldn’t be able to do
the next layer of things they wanted to do, which is the
personalization,” King said.

“If your phone is tracking everywhere you go, that data is used
generally to build a portrait of who you are and what you do,” King
said. “There’s no constraints on the companies, any company, using
that knowledge.”

Ferguson said Monday the first step is to wait for Google to respond
and then to start the discovery process to seek more information
about the company’s practices and how they impacted Washington
residents.

“Google is a big corporation and they may put up a fight,” he said.
“I’m here to see this through and get meaningful change for
Washingtonians, even if that takes time.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/washington-attorney-general-
sues-google-over-location-tracking/