Google Burns Few Hours of Profit to Disappear Location Privacy Lawsuit

[upnorth]

Content source

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/04/google_privacy_lawsuit_settlement/

Google will pay $85 million to settle a privacy lawsuit that accused the internet behemoth of deceiving netizens regarding its harvesting of people's location data and using this personal info to rake in billions of dollars in advertising revenue.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) sued Google in May 2020 over these alleged deceptive tracking practices, and since then, several other states in the US including Washington, Texas, Indiana, and the District of Columbia, have filed similar lawsuits against the Android titan. At the heart of the allegations: that Google uses "dark patterns" in its user interfaces – deceptive controls and layout of settings – to fool people into providing their real-time whereabouts to the mega-corp for targeted advertising purposes. The attorneys general contend that because this data is critical to Google's advertising business, the company has a financial incentive to discourage users from withholding access to their location data. Ergo, Google deliberately engineers its software so that people don't realize they are handing over details of where they've physically been and when, or don't realize how much they are sharing, or so it was claimed.

Google pays $85m to settle location privacy lawsuit

Phrasing, Arizona... AG claims deal is 'historic'

www.theregister.com

 

[TedCruz]

Google pays $85m to settle location privacy lawsuit

Phrasing, Arizona... AG claims deal is 'historic'

www.theregister.com

It's scary how much they know about you. Best example is just to look at your map history where they indicate where you have been today, yesterday, back in 2012. How many hours you walked, how many miles you walked, how many flights of stairs, how long you drove, which store you visited the most, how busy was that store. They have the total pattern of life on you and your shopping habits. If google ever becomes self aware, we are screwed!

The same can be said for Amazon, with their Alexa for home, Alexa for car and now they even have a lamp that watches you sleep and tells you via remote sensing how well you slept, if you snored, what was your body temperature and respiration rate and if you don't pay your bill they will send the Amazon home robot thingy to suffocate you at night....shhh...shhh...only dreams now. My son just turned on fart task on my Alexa, I didn't know about it, so I passed gas when I woke up and my Alexa said: "Ewww daddy farted!"

 

[ForgottenSeer 95367]

It's scary how much they know about you.

Even if the settings were simple to understand, 3 out of 4 people or greater would opt-in because they would not bother looking at the settings.