Google to pay $93M in settlement over deceptive location tracking

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/14/google-location-tracking-data-settlement

by Brajeshwar • 3 years ago

237 63 3 years ago

theguardian.com

eternal_braid• 3 years ago

"a considerable payout for the tech giant that following a years-long investigation into its data practices."

rvz• 3 years ago

That isn’t good enough. It should be $9.3B dollars since Google does this on a repeated basis.

A slap on the wrist like this will make them continue their actions and nothing will change.

dahfizz2• 3 years ago

The behavior in question has already changed

jacquesm3• 3 years ago

So? No reason not to royally fine them. Because it isn't just about this particular action, it is also about all the other abuses, past and present.

pxoe2• 3 years ago

this location timeline page https://timeline.google.com/maps/timeline should be included up along in there. if not deceptive, it's certainly badly designed and confusing enough for you to overlook what options are available to you. in dark mode, these little buttons (that actually manage your data and obscure important options) are almost unnoticeable. and this is somehow the only way to delete your location data, both web and mobile. even on android it's still just a redirect to that same web page. there is no native 'delete location history' button. (and if you do open that page on android, you might have to sign in to your account again before even seeing anything lol. as always, burying and obscuring controls. it couldn't be that hard to implement a 'delete all' button on activity controls page right before, but oh nooo, what if people would actually deprive google of location data.)

lkbm• 3 years ago

For me there's a big "Manage Location History" button on the main page, which has a clear option to turn off or turn off and delete, as well auto-delete setting. Not sure how dark mode would affect how visible it is, but in the default view, it's pretty in your face.

I'd say the trickiest bit is probably finding your timeline in the first place if you don't regularly make use of it, but I get periodic emails about it — at least a monthly summary.

EDIT: Looks like, at least in Firefox, the page doesn't respect Dark Mode at all.

EDIT 2: Here's the top and bottom of my monthly email from them: https://imgur.com/a/oUez8ZC — multiple direct links to the page to turn off and delete location data.

ethbr12• 3 years ago

Also, on Firefox Android Mobile, it flags private mode as an unsupported browser, and only displays the "Delete All" button at the bottom.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

This has to be the most visible privacy control Google offers. Nobody is in Location History unless they turned it on, and if you have it turned on you get a reminder every month by email that says right at the top, in the snippet, "You're receiving this email because you turned on Location History, a Google Account-level setting that creates Timeline, a personal map of your visited places, routes, and trips. You can view, edit, and delete this data anytime in Timeline."

pxoe2• 3 years ago

well, try going for deletion of all location history and see how that goes for 'the most visible control'

CrzyLngPwd• 3 years ago

That fine is so small that it is just another cost of doing business.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

The fine reflects the weakness of the state's case. The defendants whittled it down to where the expected value of litigating it was equal to the cost of settling it.

dehrmann• 3 years ago

And they tie your location history to ad views and surface this to advertisers.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/13/google-lo...

doctor_radium2• 3 years ago

I'm confused. What is the Android or app configuration necessary to enable this tracking? "Web and app activity", the only setting mentioned in the article, doesn't ring a bell. Is it all assuming the creation and use of a Google account?

eks3912• 3 years ago

Yes, however most people have google accounts. For example, with an android, it is impossible to download an app from the Play Store without a google account (assuming you aren't using a mirror, and other stipulations), so that alone encapsulats half of Americans, and google has several other products unrelated to android you could be using.

The people in developed countries who this doesn't affect could be negligible.

doctor_radium2• 3 years ago

Thanks for explaining. Happy (for once) to hear that I'm negligible.

arpowers• 3 years ago

Two weeks ago i was in San Francisco with a friend that works in "big tech" discussing "profit motives" in technology.

They told me that the lobby behind their company had all sorts of tricks to help government "ignore" all the clearly negative things they are doing in the name of revenue. Lobbying, anonymous stock trading "tips" (see Pelosi), influence pedding, etc..

Modern technology companies are all doing what the Tobacco companies did, only they have more plausible deniability.

jacquesm3• 3 years ago

So a friend of yours told you that Pelosi accepted insider information to make a bundle and both you and your friend did nothing about it? Are you aware that the SEC will reward you for such information assuming it is true?

devindotcom• 3 years ago

Folks talking about how easy it is to see and change these settings, remember that many of the patterns and practices being litigated go back years to when these settings were less clearly stated, if they were stated at all. The reason there is such transparency now is because of years of pressure from lawsuits, regulators, and reporting.

Justsignedup• 3 years ago

Also to add.

Many people don't understand this in the same way that many people don't understand the tweaks you can make to your car engine.

Sometimes they make changes which undoes the settings and sometimes settings are per device. It is quite difficult to keep track of it all.

And sometimes turning off an ad feature cuts out a ton of non ad features. Example I can't turn off Google location tracking ad features without turning off googles ability to show me recent locations I drove to which I find quite helpful.

gustavus• 3 years ago

For me it's less about knowing how to turn them off and the constant worrying fear they'll be reset with the latest update, or some random feature that I actually need will get turned off along with it.

ethbr12• 3 years ago

Agreed. It'd be nice to have a tiered, single-point consent system, where user-preference was cascaded down to preclude auto-opt-in.

E.g. "Do you want to be tracked?"

If you answer no, then no feature which tracks you can be default opt-in, even if subsequently shipped.

chrsig• 3 years ago

When considering bad faith actors, I tend to consider taking extreme: I worry that the toggles don't actually do anything at all. Or there's some other means of exfiltration in use that's not covered by the existing controls.

godelski2• 3 years ago

the constant worrying fear they'll be reset with the latest update

Which happens a lot and is very annoying.

A fantastic example is how Twitter defaulted everyone's DMs to only allow them from people that pay for subscriptions. It is also buried. Settings > Privacy and Safety > Direct Messages. What a fucking crazy dark pattern. It's so bad I see recruiters routinely post "DM me" and they have their inbox closed.

JohnMakin• 3 years ago

They likely made way more than $93M doing this, which means this is just a cost of business, and does nothing for consumer protections going forward, nor does it discourage google from continuing this behavior.

You need fines with real teeth or pass laws that make this illegal.

njovin• 3 years ago

$93m is approximately 172 minutes worth of revenue for Google.

booleandilemma• 3 years ago

Where do all these millions go exactly?

predkambrij• 3 years ago

Do fooled people get any of that?

stuff4ben• 3 years ago

Wonder how much they made selling that data instead?

AlbertCory• 3 years ago

I don't know if this was already mentioned, but I am getting pissed off at how often my Settings get changed without my doing anything.

Auto-rotate: goes off, have to reset.

Screen timeout: gets reset to 15 seconds.

Some programs are able to change your Settings without explicit permission from you. This should be just plain impossible.

hotstickyballs• 3 years ago

Are you on android?

julianlam• 3 years ago

While Google is not admitting any fault as part of the settlement, the company did agree to several other terms in addition to paying $93m. Those conditions include being more transparent about its location tracking practices; notifying users before location information is used to build ad profiles to target specific people; and getting approval from Google’s internal privacy working group before making any material changes to privacy.

That last line is oddly reminiscent of the government delegating safety audits to the airplane manufacturers themselves.

M3L0NM4N• 3 years ago

Yeah, but it makes me wonder if an internal privacy working group already existed, and they weren't approving changes in privacy rules, what were they actually doing?

sa-code• 3 years ago

Being employed, so that Google can say they employ them

jvolkman• 3 years ago

It's not as if privacy teams are reviewing each code change at Google. The teams making changes are generally responsible for knowing if and when to seek out approval/advice.

hedora2• 3 years ago

is used to build ad profiles to target specific people

I was wondering how they'd comply for logged out users. I'll bet the phrase "specific people" explicitly excludes pseudonymous profiles (which are trivial to de-anonymize) and explicitly allows them to use clustering algorithms with arbitrarily fine granularity. ("This isn't a profile for a specific user. It's a cluster that could contain an arbitrary number users. It currently only contains one, but that's bound to happen, given the number of clusters...")

hk1337• 3 years ago

Should be $93M/person

distant_hat• 3 years ago

So like an hour of revenue.

trollerator23• 3 years ago

Nice drop in the bucket.

nologic01• 3 years ago

You can find hordes of shills to state otherwise but alas tech has become an industry that is based on deception.

Its a fateful turn of events. It means that the fundamental and very powerful information engineering skill, something that is in-principle vital, neutral and promising, is lost to the world as a force for good.

You cant put lipstick on a pig. That moral deficit at the core of the industry is fatal. Nothing good or lasting will be built on it.

entropicgravity• 3 years ago

Wow $93m for each of us! I can hardly wait to open my mailbox.

evolve2k2• 3 years ago

“To the rich, parking fines are just price tags” [1]

While annoying for Google, this is a mosquito bite.

Google Annual Revenue: $279,800 Million

And today they’ll be fined: .. .. $93 Million

It’s about “an hour” of their annual income.

At these prices it’s pretty much worth it to be pulling all sorts of unethical moves. This is not even the price to play but rather the price if you get caught.

1. https://i.pinimg.com/564x/a6/06/ec/a606ec5c539472182cf126226...

2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

hnav• 3 years ago

Google's net income is something like 60b, so more like half a day which is a bit more significant. Multiply that by all the different angles regulators are going to be coming for big tech and it might start to add up enough that it shapes internal policy further.

hedora2• 3 years ago

Since almost all of their revenue is from tracking users, that implies we'll need over of these rulings per day if we want it to be economically rational for them to stop violating people's privacy.

evolve2k2• 3 years ago

When we as externals are at “if enough fines are issued it might start to shift behaviour” we’re very much dealing with a party for whom this is a mere inconvenience.

_jab• 3 years ago

Comparing the entire company's revenue to the fine is a bit misleading. Arguably, the more relevant comparison is to consider how much marginal revenue the violating feature actually produced. Granted, probably no one besides Google knows that number, but it's surely orders of magnitude lower. If those numbers are comparable, this starts to look like a reasonable penalty.

hankchinaski• 3 years ago

exactly - people each time there is a fine they continue to regurgitate the usual "but what bout their revenue" - people on the orange site thinking they know better than a panel of expert regulators

sodality22• 3 years ago

I definitely don’t ascribe to the notion that crimes should be punished equally to their benefit to the party. Otherwise bank thieves would just give it all back when caught, and the risk to reward is minimal. It should be enough to dissuade a company from ever doing these illegal acts

wuiheerfoj• 3 years ago

Not defending the comparison against revenue, but we’d need to compare the value produced by the illegal tracking against the probability of getting caught and fined. Given google are unlikely to be the only one doing this, the expected value of breaking the law could still be quite high

everforward• 3 years ago

I don't think the marginal revenue is directly relevant. The relevant question is how big does the fine have to be to discourage illegal behavior in the future? The marginal revenue of the behavior is somewhat relevant because the fine should obviously be at or higher than that amount, but that's really a lower bound.

They lost a similar case in 2012 about lying to Safari users about privacy settings and were fined $22.5M (~$31M today). They lost one in 2010 about violating the Wiretap Act for collecting packets from unencrypted wifi networks. They lost another one in 2010 for Google Buzz. Some of those were settled, but I would consider it roughly equivalent to losing if they'd rather buy their way out than have to present a case.

Given that they previously lost a case (to California, again, no less) with similar underlying issues, I would consider this to be flagrant flouting of the law and it should be punished proportionally to that flagrancy. Roosevelt said to "speak softly and carry a big stick". Google didn't listen to the soft speaking, so California should hit them with the big stick hard enough to remind them that they only exist in California at the pleasure of the people of California.

My proposal would be a fine equal to 100% of revenue derived from Californians for the period they were violating the law. They need a fine big enough that the C-levels start asking legal whether they can use the bathroom or not, and a promise that all future violations will be treated the same way. For pity's sake, California has a 3 strikes system for individuals. It's not like the state doesn't do disproportionate punishment. If Google were a person, they would've been in jail a decade ago and probably staring down California's 3-strike law and life in prison.

yencabulator• 3 years ago

That lets them use the revenue from the other business units (that didn't get caught that year) as insurance against the loss when one business unit does get caught. The punishment has to hurt the whole company, or it's pointless.

robocat• 3 years ago

Revenue: $279,800 Million > about “an hour” of their annual income

Nitpick: mistaking revenue for income(profit) is a very common error most of us make when talking about businesses. If you wish to own a business or invest, it is well worthwhile to program the difference into your head. It matters less for high margin businesses, but it is crucial to delineate the difference for low margin businesess (such as retail).

unmole• 3 years ago

Revenue is not income.

Google to pay $93M in settlement over deceptive location tracking

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