In 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Google for a series of alleged privacy violations. First, he filed a complaint under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act in January. This argued that the tech giant had continued to track the locations of Texas residents even after they thought that they had disabled the tracking feature. Paxton added Google’s Incognito mode to this lawsuit a few months later. He asserted that Google had misled consumers by claiming that the Incognito mode in its Chrome browser shields them from having their internet search and activity history recorded.
Later that year, Paxton sued Google again for allegedly violating a Texas privacy law called the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act. Paxton claimed that the tech company took and used the biometric data of Texas residents without getting their informed consent. These violations supposedly went back to at least 2015 and involved products such as Google Photos and Google Assistant.
These cases concluded last week when the parties agreed in principle to a settlement worth $1.375 billion. This is the most that any attorney general has recovered from Google in claims based on state privacy laws. A spokesperson for the tech company emphasized that the settlement doesn’t mean that Google admits to any wrongdoing.
The settlement echoes Paxton’s success last year in recovering $1.4 billion from Meta (originally Facebook) for its allegedly improper use of facial recognition data. The Texas Attorney General also participated in a coalition of state attorneys general who recovered a $700 million settlement from Google in late 2023. This involved allegedly anti-competitive conduct related to the Google Play Store. Most of the settlement went to consumers, but the states collected $70 million in penalties.
Paxton also has set up a data privacy and security initiative in the Consumer Protection Division of the Office of the Attorney General. The initiative aims to help enforce not only state privacy laws but also some federal laws, such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
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