Google has agreed to pay $9.5 million to resolve a lawsuit filed earlier this year by Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine, who accused Google of “deceiving people and breaching their privacy.” Google has also agreed to modify certain of its procedures, mainly how it notifies users about the collection, storage, and use of their location data.
Racine’s office also accused Google of using “dark patterns,” which are design decisions meant to trick people into doing acts that aren’t in their best interests. The AG’s office stated that Google constantly asked users to enable location monitoring in certain applications and advised them that key functions would not function correctly if location tracking was disabled. Racine and his colleagues discovered that location data was not even required for the app in the issue. According to them, Google has made it “difficult for consumers to opt-out of having their location recorded.”
