Google will pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle privacy lawsuits

Google has agreed to pay the state of Texas $1.375 billion to settle two lawsuits accusing the company of tracking users’ personal location, incognito searches, and voice and facial data without their permission.

The lawsuits were brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in 2022. Facebook’s parent company Meta agreed to pay a similar amount to settle a facial recognition-related lawsuit from Paxton last year.

“In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law,” Paxton said in a statement. “For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won.”

Paxton’s office also said this is the “highest recovery nationwide against Google for any attorney general’s enforcement of state privacy laws.”

A Google spokesperson said the company is settling the lawsuits without any admission of wrongdoing or liability, and without having to change any of its products.

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

Google won some earlier victories in these suits, for example with an appeals court ruling that the company lacks sufficient ties to Texas to face a lawsuit there. The company had initially responding by saying Paxton mischaracterized its products “in another breathless lawsuit” — for example, the company said Google Photos only scanned users’ faces in order to group similar photos together, and that it did not use the feature for advertising.

The settlement comes after major antitrust rulings finding that Google acted illegally to maintain monopolies in web search and advertising tech, with proposed remedies including the divestment of Chrome. (Google has said it will appeal both rulings.)

Paxton, meanwhile, recently announced that he will challenge U.S. Senator John Cornyn in next year’s mid-term elections.