All of this came after an investigation where officials found that the company tracked people’s locations even after they opted to refuse. William Tong, the Attorney General of Connecticut, said:

Google broke consumer protections laws, as stated by authorities

As per the authorities, the company broke consumer-protection laws by misleading users and secretly recording their movements. At the same time, they then offered the data to digital marketers to sell ads, which is their primary source of revenue. Speaking about the matter, the attorney general also said:

Many media houses have reported that Google services on Android devices and iPhones store data of the users’ location even if they set their privacy settings to not allow the information to be recorded. However, the conglomerate has said that the investigation was based on “outdated product policies” that they had already addressed.

Many reports from known media houses also stated that a coalition of attorneys general from multiple cities and states like Oregon, New York, Florida, Nebraska, etc., opened an investigation after the Associate Press filed a report in 2018 about how the company silently tracked the users’ location.

The report alleged that the conglomerate tricked the users into believing that their location had been turned off all these years, whereas they used to record each and every moment, and then use it for advertising and revenue generation.

Following the settlement, the tech giant will now be providing more detailed information about the data being tracked. At the same time, the company will also launch a new toggle to turn off or delete the location history in just a few clicks.

The multi-million dollar settlement came just after the tech giant paid $85 million to Arizona after facing allegations of how the company tricked users into believing that they had turned off location-tracking on their Android mobiles. Google has faced similar lawsuits from other states like Washington, Texas, and Indiana.

Speaking about the issue, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said in a statement:

Furthermore, it is to be noted that Google made $111 billion just from advertising in the first half of the year. Many experts in the field believe that leaking the consumers’ locations is helping the advertisers make big bucks by making the ads more relevant and grabbing more customer attention.

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