Google agrees to pay $1.4B to settle Texas data privacy lawsuit

Google agreed to a $1.375B data privacy settlement with the Lone Star State over the alleged use of facial recognition, location data, and Chrome incognito. To date, no state has attained a settlement against Google for similar data privacy violations greater than $93M.

Texas Attorney General (AG) Ken Paxton won a $1.375B settlement from Google to resolve claims of illegally tracking users’ geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data. The attorney general said the settlement, which covered allegations in two separate lawsuits against the search engine and app giant, dwarfed all past settlements by other states with Google for similar data privacy violations.

Google’s settlement came approximately 10 months after Paxton obtained a $1.4 billion settlement for Texas from Meta to resolve claims of unauthorized use of biometric data of Facebook and Instagram users. The attorney general said in a statement on Friday that Big Tech is not above the law in Texas.

AG Paxton records historic win against Google for the people of Texas 

AG Paxton secured a $1.375 billion settlement with Google to deliver a historic win for the people of Texas with regard to data privacy and security rights. Even a multistate coalition that included forty states only secured just $391 million—almost a billion dollars less than Texas’s recovery. Paxton sued Google in 2022 for unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data. 

However, Google spokesman Jose Castaneda claimed that the company did not admit any wrongdoing or liability in the settlement, which involved allegations related to the Chrome browser’s incognito setting, disclosures related to location history on the Google Maps app, and biometric claims related to Google Photos.

Paxton stated that this billion-dollar settlement was a major win for Texans’ privacy, and it told companies that they would pay for abusing the trust of his state’s residents.

“For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won.”

-Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas

Notably, Castaneda said Google did not have to make any changes to products in connection with the settlement and that all of the policy changes that the company made in connection with the allegations were previously announced or implemented.

Paxton secures $1.4B Meta settlement over the abuse of biometric data 

Meta previously agreed to pay a record $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit by the state of Texas over the Facebook owner’s unauthorized use of biometric data from users.

Paxton’s office said ‘unbeknownst to most Texans,’ Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook for over a decade, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted. The AG’s Meta settlement was a rare win against Big Tech’s surveillance overreach—but it was just the tip of the iceberg.

Meta’s decade-long facial recognition scheme proved that Silicon Valley viewed privacy as optional until states started to crack down on big techs. Notably, Paxton asserted that any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data would be met with the full force of the law. The Texas AG said the win against Meta stopped the company’s practice of capturing and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without the authorization required by law.

However, a spokesperson for Meta disclosed that the company was pleased to resolve the matter and looked forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen its business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers. 

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