Google agreed to pay a total of $391.5 million to 40 US states to resolve a probe into controversial location-tracking practices that the Alphabet Inc. unit says it already discarded several years ago, in what state officials are calling the largest such privacy settlement in US history.
Google will “significantly improve” its location-tracking disclosures and user controls starting next year as part of the deal, according to a statement issued Monday by Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, who led the negotiations with her Nebraska counterpart, Doug Peterson.
In an interview, Rosenblum called Google’s practices “crafty and deceptive” because the company had secretly recorded users’ movements and provided the data to advertisers for years, even after consumers believed they had turned off the location-tracking feature.
