My Question is why only Texas is suing and how Google can continue collecting data on people in Texas going forward. What was the lawsuit really about? How is this only a one time fine and not the end of Google’s business model and practices of spying.
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Some other states had already sued. google claims they have already changed their practices (hah!).
Probably just a way for Texas to collect $1+B like they also got from FB.
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These appear to be only token lawsuits so that states can collect some money before they allow the legal abuses to continue.
Any credible lawsuit against Google would need to create an existential threat to Google. To really stop the spying and abusive targeted advertising, Google needs to fear that they might really be driven out of business if they don’t change their practices so as to not profit from tracking anything about anyone on the internet. The terms of service need to change. Google needs to be denied Admin access to my phone. All Android phones need easy access to app stores that have nothing to do with Google, and that Google gets no data from. I don’t want Google to know which apps are on my phone, nor who is in my list of contacts. I don’t want Google to build any kind of profile on me, nor to include my name and information in any data that they sell. To take all of that away from them will take an existential threat. Lawsuits against Google, a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there are not about protecting public privacy. I don’t know what they are about. But I know that they aren’t going to stop Google from selling information about me.
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Quite a Manifesto you wrote here!
But one has to separate things: what is legal and what is wrongdoing (legally speaking)
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This lawsuit you refer to is a settlement. They agreed to pay a huge amount of money, because they could not deny that what they did was unlawful. They paid because they wanted to avoid trail - which they know they would probably loose anyway; and be criminals (condemned for a crime) Just as other settlements for incognito mode not really being incognito, or location tracking happening even when the geoloc setting is
off- all of these cases are criminal offences because they are outside of the legal consent the end user gave for using the service or app. They overstepped the line and acted stealthily, with purpose to deceit. -
For the rest of all what you complain about, there is no wrongdoing. This is you, the end user, who accepted their terms. You clicked
OK. You clickedI AGREE. You enslaved yourself to the ecosystem and abided by their rules in accepting the conditions, terms of service, EULA or whatever legalese.
And even if not Google itself, every app you ever installed you had to accept some terms of use for your own enslavement. Because they ALL do this, not only Google: all of them track you, syphon your data and sell it to data brockers, the goldmine of our era, your data!
Thankfully, there are digital ecosystems where you don’t have to accept any condition to use a device or a software. There is no box to click on, no I AGREE. This is freedom. It is entirely one’s choice atfer all.
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This isn’t a criminal matter. It is a civil matter. However unlike most civil matters, and like most criminal matters in practice, this particular law empowers the (Texas) government exclusively, more precisely, the (Texas) Attorney General exclusively, to pursue this civil remedy.
I didn’t check this but unfortunately I don’t think any of the money will find its way into the pockets of the victims. So it’s really just a nice little earner for the (Texas) government.
Also note that the suit is solely about the use of biometric identifiers without appropriate consent. Google violates privacy in many many other ways but those other ways are not the subject of this suit.
They also avoid formally admitting liability or wrongdoing.
“Google says” that it
does not have to make any changes to products in connection with the settlement and that all of the policy changes that the company made in connection with the allegations were previously announced or implemented
I don’t know that that is true but it is generally true that it takes a long time for cases to wend their way through the courts so if Google judged that they had a slim chance of defending the suit, they might have decided to fix the underlying issues without waiting for the case to end.
The particular law does not outlaw the collection of biometric identifiers. It merely requires consent in advance. As we all know, that is not a panacea. People will give consent e.g. because they don’t care or e.g. because they don’t fully understand the implications or e.g. because they value what they are getting more than what they are giving up.
So if you really want to end Google’s business model, you are going to need a much stronger law.
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Ok, I understand. I was a bit quick with this classification of mine…I will retract “criminal” (but I think no less) My confusion came from the fact that the Attorney General was suing.
This. And also the fact that it is merely a line “cost of doing business” in their ledger.
Yes. Dark patterns. This entire industry’s way of cheating on people’s informed consent and them understanding what’s really at stake. Consent dialogs are now perceived as a mere annoyance and acted upon as “cut the crap and launch the app now” - people have been trained to this, they don’t even think!
But aside from dark patterns and missing consent for this or that, what can be said when they clearly cross the line, stealthily and covertly, with intent to deceive? Isn’t this much worse than missing consent or wrong wording? Does this behavior only deserve a fine and nothing more?
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In this case, it was alleged, among other things, that a whole lot of (Texan) people were simply captured in photographs as “bystanders” and then Google would analyse the photos - and hence those people never had the opportunity to give or refuse consent. That is another way in which consent is cheated on by Surveillance Capitalism.
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