Google must pay $1,375 million to the state of Texas as a resolution of two lawsuits for data privacy violations filed in 2022 by Attorney General Ken Paxton.
This historic ruling comes after several years of litigation between Texas and the tech giant, and marks a turning point in the application of state privacy laws in the United States to a company like Google.
The lawsuits filed by Paxton in 2022 accused Google of illegally tracking and collecting private user data. They highlighted the following misconducts:
Finally, the Texas Attorney General has reached an agreement with Google, and the company must pay $1,375 million. “I fought and won. This $1,375 million settlement is a great victory for the privacy of Texans, and it tells companies that they will pay for abusing our trust. I will always protect Texans by stopping the attempts of big tech companies to profit from selling our rights and freedoms,” stated Attorney General Paxton.
The resolution of this case imposes a penalty far greater than those established in other proceedings against Google conducted by any U.S. state. “To date, no state has achieved a settlement against Google for similar privacy violations that surpasses $91 million. Even a multistate coalition that included forty states obtained only $391 million, nearly a billion dollars less than Texas’s recovery,” Paxton stated.
Additionally, this case joins the list of victories for the Texas Attorney General against large companies. Among these stands out the settlement with Meta of $1,400 million for collecting and using biometric data of Texan users without authorization. This is “the largest settlement ever obtained in a lawsuit filed by a single state“.
Photo: GPT-4o
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