Virginia to receive $10 million of Google's $400 million tracking practices settlement
WASHINGTON - Attorneys general in Virginia and Maryland have announced a multimillion-dollar settlement with Google over location data.
Investigators started looking into this when a 2018 AP article revealed that Google tracked your location even when you told it not to. Now, Google is settling with 39 states for nearly $392 million.
Not only will Google pay up about $10 million to Virginians and $8 million to Maryland residents, they will also have to show you more information when you turn a location tracker on or off. They also can't hide the ball about location tracking, and they have to give you detailed information about the types of data they collect.
Google said in a statement today that these requirements are consistent with improvements they have already made. This settlement, Google says, was based on outdated product policies that were changed years ago.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said Google violated consumer protection laws by misleading customers about its location tracking since at least 2014. Specifically, Google confused users about how much location information they were tracking.
Location data can reveal deeply personal information about where you live, work, shop, worship, and what kind of activities you participate in. One expert says the settlement may be letting Google get off easy.
"The dollar amount of the settlement seems big but when you consider that the practices in question were spread across tens of millions of users it's really only a few dollars per person," said John Davisson with the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"The settlement comes up short in a few key ways. It doesn't really affect Google's core business model. It doesn't change the fact that the company is profiting handsomely from the personal data that it collects and uses to target advertising," Davisson said.
Just last year, Governor Ralph Northam signed a brand-new consumer data protection law in Virginia. It is supposed to control how companies use your personal data.
As we continue to carry these around in our hands or pockets, companies know the value of the information they contain about where we are and where we go.