The company has hit back at a lawsuit in the US that alleges ‘deceptive’ Android location tracking and says such suits misrepresent and inflate the control and settings Google provides its users over their location data.
Attorneys general from three states and the District of Columbia sued Google earlier, alleging that the tech giant used “repeated nudging, misleading pressure tactics, and evasive and deceptive descriptions” to share more information either “inadvertently or out of frustration.”
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In 2020, the Arizona Attorney General filed a complaint about the collection of location data.
On Tuesday, the Arizona Attorney General was ruled in contempt of court by a court in Arizona..
“The AG is somehow claiming this as a big victory but in reality, a judge rejected his central argument. Unfortunately, just before today’s decision, four other state attorneys general rushed to file similar lawsuits making similarly inaccurate and outdated claims,” the company said in a blog post late on Tuesday.
Location data is integral to the way smartphones work, according to Google.
“For our part, location makes Google products work better for you — it’s what helps you navigate around a traffic jam, helps you find your phone when you’ve misplaced it, and lets you find a pizza shop in your neighborhood instead of suggesting one in a different state,” said the company.
Google’s data retention practices were updated two years ago.
“In addition to turning Location History and Web & App Activity off, you can choose to automatically auto-delete them after a set period of time (3 months, 18 months, or 36 months). (For new users, the default is to auto-delete them after 18 months),” said the company.
Google said it will continue to offer simple, easy-to-understand privacy settings to users, and said it would not be distracted by meritless lawsuits that mischaracterize the company’s efforts.
The fresh lawsuit claims that Google’s settings “purport to give consumers control over the location data that Google collects and uses. But Google’s misleading, ambiguous, and incomplete descriptions of these settings all but guarantee that consumers will not understand when their location is collected and retained by Google or for what purposes.”
