Joining the lawsuit filed in December are Alaska, Florida,
Montana, Nevada and Puerto Rico, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said. This
brings the number of plaintiffs in the lawsuit to 15 states and territories.
The lawsuit was one of three filed last year by the federal
government or states against Google.
In announcing Tuesday’s amended complaint, Paxton and the
other attorneys general also divulged details about Google’s relationship with
Facebook Inc.
“Our coalition looks forward to holding Google accountable
for its illegal conduct and reforming Google’s practices in the future,” Paxton
said in a statement. “We are confident Google will be forced to pay for its
misconduct through significant financial penalties.”
Google is fighting the allegations, and a hearing scheduled
for Thursday is expected to include discussion of the company’s petition for a
Texas federal court to move the case to California.
The lawsuit accuses Google of violating the law in how it
dominates the steps in the process of placing ads online. It alleges Google
quietly teams with its closest online advertising competitor, Facebook, and
that it uses the excuse of protecting users’ privacy to act unfairly.
Publishers complain that one result has been lower revenues.
The amended complaint states that Facebook and Google “work
together to identify users using Apple products,” without elaborating. Apple
Inc in recent years on its Safari browser and iPhones has increased ways to
block what it views as privacy-intrusive user tracking by ad tech companies,
some of which have tried to devise circumvention measures.
Google in statement described the new claim as a “meritless”
addition to an “already meritless lawsuit.”
Facebook declined to comment, and Apple did not respond to a
request for comment.
The revised complaint also adds that beginning in 2015,
Google could view messages from Facebook’s WhatsApp service that users backed
up to Google’s Drive cloud storage system.
Google knew users were uninformed about its access, but “did
nothing to correct this misunderstanding,” the lawsuit states. Google Drive
gained almost 250 million new users by June 2016 because of the WhatsApp
partnership, according to the lawsuit.
Google added in its statement that the lawsuit made a “false
insinuation that we use backed up WhatsApp data for advertising purposes.” - Reuters
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