Australia's competition watchdog said on Friday that Alphabet Inc's Google unit was ordered by the country's Federal Court to pay A$60 million ($42.7 million) in penalties for misleading users on collection of their personal location data.
The court found Google misled some customers about personal
location data collected through their Android mobile devices between January
2017 and December 2018.
Google misled users into believing "location
history" setting on their android phones was the only way location data
could be collected by it, when a feature to monitor web and applications
activity also allowed local data collection and storage, the Australian
Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) said.
The watchdog, which estimates that 1.3 million Google
account users in Australia may have been affected, had started the proceedings
against the company and its local unit in October 2019.
Google took remedial measures in 2018, the regulator said.
In an emailed statement, Google said it had settled the
matter and added it has made location information simple to manage and easy to
understand.
The search engine giant has been embroiled in legal action in Australia over the past year as the government mulled and passed a law to make Google and Meta Platforms' Facebook pay media companies for content on their platforms.
0 comments:
Post a Comment