Attorney General Paxton initiated the legal action in 2022, leveraging Texas state laws pertaining to data privacy and deceptive trade practices. This landmark settlement closely follows a similar $1.4 billion agreement secured by Paxton less than a year prior with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over allegations of illegally tagging users' faces on its platforms.
This financial penalty marks the latest in a series of legal challenges for Google. Over the past two years, the tech behemoth has faced a string of unfavorable rulings in antitrust cases, having been found to hold monopolistic power over its app store, search engine, and advertising technology. Notably, the company has spent the last three weeks actively defending itself in a search-related antitrust case, attempting to dissuade the U.S. government from pursuing a breakup of its core business.
"Big Tech is not above the law," asserted Attorney General Paxton in a released statement, underscoring the state's commitment to holding powerful technology companies accountable for their data handling practices.
Responding to the settlement, Google spokesman José Castañeda indicated that the company has already implemented changes to its product policies. "This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere," Castañeda stated.
The issue of privacy has increasingly become a contentious area of interaction between major technology companies and regulatory bodies in recent years. In the absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States, states like Texas and Washington have taken the initiative to enact their own legislation aimed at curbing the collection of sensitive biometric data, including facial and voice recognition information.
Google and Meta have emerged as the most prominent companies facing legal challenges under these state-level privacy laws. Texas' specific law, known as the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, mandates that companies obtain explicit permission before utilizing technologies such as facial or voice recognition. The legislation empowers the state to levy substantial damages, potentially reaching up to $25,000 per violation.
The lawsuit brought under this biometric data law specifically targeted Google's Photos app, which offered facial recognition-based photo search functionality; the Google Nest camera, capable of sending alerts based on visitor recognition; and Google Assistant, a virtual assistant that could learn and identify the voices of up to six users.
In a separate legal action, Attorney General Paxton accused Google of engaging in deceptive practices by allegedly tracking Texans' personal location data even when users believed they had disabled this feature. Furthermore, he added a complaint alleging that Google's Incognito mode, marketed as a private browsing setting, did not, in reality, provide true privacy.
These latter claims were brought under Texas' Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The substantial settlement reached signifies a strong message from Texas regarding the importance of user privacy and the potential consequences for tech companies that are found to be in violation of state laws.