An ongoing lawsuit against Google by the Arizona attorney general’s office, which alleges that the tech behemoth has continued to collect location information even when users had turned tracking off, has revealed that some of Google’s own employees had concerns about the company’s practices after a news report detailing the controversy was published.
“The reality is that the stuff we’ve uncovered is shocking,” Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich told FOX Business in an interview last week. “It just confirms that Google is doing everything it can to spy on everyone it can, without providing any sort of notice to anyone.”
Brnovich’s office sued Google in May of last year, alleging that the tech giant used deceptive and unfair practices to track users’ location, even if they had opted out — and used that information to target users with ads that generated more than $130 billion in revenue in 2019.
The practice had initially been revealed after an Associated Press article in 2018 reported that Google could continue to track users’ locations even after they had opted out of Google getting access into “location history.” The outlet reported that, even with location history paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped data without a prompt, such as storing a snapshot of a location just when someone opens its “Maps” application. Read more…
