US prosecutors sue Google for misleading users about privacy

The attorneys general of three US states and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits against Google on Monday for allegedly misleading users into believing that they could prevent the company from knowing their location when in fact it was still accessing this information.

In a statement, the Attorney General of the District of Columbia (where the US capital, Washington, is located), Karl Racine, said that the lawsuit accuses Google to “trick and manipulate” consumers to gain access to their location data.

“(Google) made it virtually impossible for users to prevent the company from accessing their location data,” Racine said.

In addition to the attorney general of the District of Columbia (belonging to the Democratic Party), his counterparts from the states of Texas (Republican), Indiana (Republican) and Washington (Democrat) filed similar lawsuits.

According to the complainants, Google systematically misleads Internet users into believing that they can control the information that the Internet company compiles about them, when in reality “there is no effective way” for users to prevent Google from collecting, storing and benefiting from the data.

In the specific case of location data, the lawsuits indicate that the victims are all those people who use mobile phones with Android operating system and those that use Google services such as the search engine or maps on other devices.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has already faces several lawsuits in the US for alleged practices contrary to antitrust laws, the largest of which was presented by the Department of Justice of the Donald Trump Government and continues with the new Administration of President Joe Biden. (I)