(Reuters) – Texas and the District of Columbia sued Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Monday over what they called deceptive location tracking practices that invade users' privacy.
Two other state attorneys general plan to file lawsuits as well as a part of a bipartisan effort to hold Google accountable over privacy, Washington D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine’s office said inside a statement.
“Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow people to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access,” Mr. Racine said.
“The the fact is that unlike Google's representations it is constantly on the systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data. Google’s bold misrepresentations are a clear violation of consumers' privacy.”
A Google spokesperson said the “attorneys general are bringing a case according to inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings. We've always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data. We'll vigorously defend ourselves and set the record straight.”
In May 2022, Arizona filed a similar lawsuit against Google over its collection of location data of users. That suit is pending.
