Google has reached a settlement with 40 US states, agreeing to pay them $391.5 million to end investigations into how the search engine collects user data, writes AFP.
According to a press release from the New Jersey Attorney General, this is the largest multi-party privacy settlement ever reached in the United States.
Google collected millions of biometric fingerprints, such as voice or facial geometry, through photo storage and editing services or voice-activated devices, according to Ken Paxton, the Texas state attorney general.
The US states accuse Google of using this information for commercial purposes, in particular to improve its artificial intelligence technologies, which require a huge amount of data for their normal operation.
“Every time Google’s algorithms process photos and video images to detect certain faces and objects (…), Google’s artificial intelligence becomes better, better informed, more efficient and more dominant,” the lawyers wrote in the document.
In February, Meta agreed to pay $90 million to settle a case in California alleging it tracked users even after they left the platform for ad targeting purposes, Agerpres reported.
Facebook has already agreed to pay $650 million in 2021 to settle a privacy dispute following a complaint filed by 1.6 million users in Illinois.
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