An Australian court has just ordered Google to pay US$42.7 because it misled users on how much data the Tech giant was collecting on them through their android devices, The Blaze reports.
According to the suit, Google was in violation of Australian Consumer Law when it misled an estimated 1.3 million Google account holders and tracked their personal locations.
Google has agreed to pay the fine.
The Blaze explains:
“This significant penalty imposed by the Court today sends a strong message to digital platforms and other businesses, large and small, that they must not mislead consumers about how their data is being collected and used,” said ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb.
“Personal location data is sensitive and important to some consumers, and some of the users who saw the representations may have made different choices about the collection, storage and use of their location data if the misleading representations had not been made by Google,” Cass-Gottlieb added.
READ: Google ordered to pay $43 million by Australian court for misleading users
Apparently, this is not the only jurisdiction where Google has gotten into trouble with collecting location data of its users as others have launched similar lawsuits including, Indiana and Texas.
As the State of Texas alleges in its lawsuit:
“Google has become one of the richest companies in the world, in part, by deceiving Texans and profiting off their confusion. Specifically, Google has systematically misled, deceived, and withheld material facts from users in Texas about how their location is tracked and used and how to stop Google from monetizing their movements. More to the point, while many Texans may reasonably believe they have disabled the tracking of their location, the reality is that Google has been hard at work behind the scenes logging their movements in a data store Google calls “Footprints.” But while footprints generally fade, Google ensures that the location information it stores about Texans is not so easily erased
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