California Attorney General Ron Bonta announced a settlement with Alphabet, the parent of Google, in a case related to location-tracking of users.
Per the terms of the settlement, Alphabet will pay $93 million to California and curtail all future location-tracking for users who have disabled the feature.
This follows a similar settlement last year with 41 states who combined received $391.5 million dollars.
“Our investigation revealed that Google was telling its users one thing – that it would no longer track their location once they opted out – but doing the opposite and continuing to track its users’ movements for its own commercial gain,” said Attorney General Bonta.
Google responded by stating, “Consistent with improvements we’ve made in recent years, we have settled this matter, which was based on outdated product policies that we changed years ago.”
It is unclear how much of an impact losing the ability to target consumers using location-tracking data will have on the company’s ad revenue.
But these lawsuits are likely peanuts to the company which has a much bigger headache on the horizon.
The US Department of Justice in January of 2023 filed an antitrust against the company for violating several parts of the Sherman Act which protects consumers from monopolies.
The DOJ is accusing Google of unfair business practices in which the company is utilizing digital advertising technologies to squash competition.
If Google loses this battle the government could force it to divest its ad services business into a separate company which could mean billions of lost revenue.
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