Google to pay record-breaking privacy settlement for location tracking

In the USA, Google will pay the biggest privacy settlement of US$391.5 million, following 40 states’ investigations of the company’s misleading location tracking practices between 2014 and 2020. According to the investigations, the users thought that they had disabled location tracking in their account settings, while Google still collected user location data through its other apps. In addition to paying the settlement sum, Google also agreed to provide more detailed information about location tracking, including what kind of data is still collected when location tracking is turned off for some settings, but not others. Moreover, it shall inform the users how to disable location tracking, erase data collected in the settings, and set data retention limits.