GOOGLE THE HIGHWAY TO HELL

1 year ago
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1-808-400-4080 Google to Pay Almost $392M to Settle 40-State Lawsuit Over Location Tracking -The states sued Google after a 2018 Associated Press story revealed that location tracking persists on Android devices and iPhones even after users thought they'd disabled it.
By Rob Pegoraro
November 15, 2022
Google ended a legal fight with 40 states over its location-tracking practices by agreeing to pay $391.5 million in fines and revise its privacy and account-setup interfaces.

The settlement announced Monday closed out a case that began after an August 2018 AP report(Opens in a new window) found that on both Android phones and iPhones, pausing Google’s “Location History” feature instead allowed continued location tracking. Users would have had to disable a separate “Web and App Activity” option to stop the company from logging their whereabouts.

Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson(Opens in a new window) and Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum(Opens in a new window), who led the 40-state lawsuit, separately heralded it as the largest consumer-privacy settlement in US history. Google, however, should feel little pain paying that fine, having announced(Opens in a new window) $13.9 billion in net income and almost $22 billion in cash and cash equivalents for its third quarter of 2022.

In a blog post(Opens in a new window), Google said the settlement addressed “outdated product policies that we changed years ago” (for instance, it defaults to automatically deleting location data after 18 months and limits the accuracy of location estimates for web searches to about 1 square mile).

Still, Google pledged upcoming changes to its interfaces for viewing and adjusting location privacy. That includes “a single, comprehensive information hub that highlights key location settings,” as well as "a new control that allows users to easily turn off their Location History and Web & App Activity settings and delete their past data in one simple flow."

It also promised to give new users “a more detailed explanation of what Web & App Activity is, what information it includes, and how it helps their Google experience.”

The settlement does not address two other risks to location privacy. First, data brokers routinely traffic in location records collected by apps that you allow to get your location. Second, the wireless carriers collect and store location data as gathered from their cell sites—one year at Verizon, up to two years at T-Mobile, and as long as five years at AT&T—and don’t let you view, edit, or delete that information.

Google employee Rodger Lister Threatened me on Saturday, March 26th, 2023 He said Google is above the law he asked what color I am he demanded I send a picture of my identification. Then he told me he had my address after telling me to shove a stick up my but then he asked if I had a girlfriend he said he was going to buy an airplane ticket and come to my home I will come and have sex with her and kill you. His phone number is 1-808-400-4080
I called the police they denied service. to me.
Here's How Long Your Wireless Carrier Holds on to Your Location Data, No comprehensive federal privacy law exists to cover these and other common data-harvesting practices, despite years of effort in Congress.
Also joining the final settlement: Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee helped Nebraska and Oregon in the negotiations with Google. Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

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