Google will pay a $1.375 billion settlement to Texas over privacy violations

Google is set to pay $1.375 billion to settle claims of data privacy violations brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, according to a press release.

Texas filed two lawsuits in 2022 against Google for “unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data,” the release says. Before now, no single state has “attained a settlement against Google for similar data-privacy violations greater than $93 million.”

“This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda tells The Verge. “We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.”

In 2022, Google agreed to pay $391.5 million to 40 states over allegations of location tracking without user consent. Last year, Meta agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over facial recognition and photo tags.