Three states and the District of Columbia are suing Google over its location-privacy practices, alleging a history of deceptive conduct intended to protect its advertising business.
Washington, D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine announced the lawsuit Monday morning.
“Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow customers to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access,” Racine says. “The truth is that contrary to Google’s representations it continues to systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data.”
The 37-page complaint alleges that Google repeatedly violated D.C.’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act by obscuring how much location data it collects and its options to limit that through a variety of deceptive, “dark-pattern” interfaces.
Lawsuits from Indiana, Texas, and Washington state announced later Monday morning allege comparable violations of those states’ privacy laws.
These suits lean heavily on a 2018 Associated Press story that documented how Android and iPhone users who had disabled Google’s “Location History” setting still had their location tracked less frequently through Google’s “Web & App Activity.”
The parties cite the PR blowback Google experienced after that story and quotes Google employees’ own embarrassed reactions. For example, one admitted that “I did not know Web and App Activity had anything to do with location.”
All four complaints seek a permanent ban on these practices and request that Google disgorge its profits from this conduct; the District and Washington state also seek the disgorgement of “any algorithms developed using such data.”
Google subsequently changed its documentation for that feature and in 2019 allowed users to set auto-delete periods for both the location and web and app activity features. In 2020, it made auto-deletion after 18 months the default on all new accounts.
Google also offers multiple controls to fine-tune the precision of its location tracking and edit or delete some or all of these records, but their workings can get quite complex. For example, while Google Maps offers a straightforward timeline of your location history if you have that enabled, seeing your location data in “Web & App Activity” seems to require inspecting individual data points in Google’s My Activity page for your account.
This lawsuit, like a lot of discussions of location privacy, does not address an even more common form of location tracking that you can’t control. Wireless carriers know your location via their cell sites and keep that history for an extended period—one year at Verizon, two years at T-Mobile, and from 13 months to five years at AT&T—while not letting you inspect, edit, or delete that information.
We emailed Google for a response, and will update if we hear back.
