Google to pay Texas $1.4 billion in data privacy settlement
A Google corporate logo hangs above the entrance to the company's office at St. John's Terminal in New York City on March 11, 2025.
Gary Hershorn | Corbis News | Getty Images
Google agreed to pay nearly $1.4 billion to the state of Texas to settle allegations of violating the data privacy rights of state residents, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Friday.
Paxton sued Google in 2022 for allegedly unlawfully tracking and collecting users' private data.
The attorney general said the settlement, which covers allegations in two separate lawsuits against the search engine and app giant, dwarfed all past settlements by other states with Google for similar data privacy violations.
Google's settlement comes nearly 10 months after Paxton obtained a $1.4 billion settlement for Texas from Meta , the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to resolve claims of unauthorized use of biometric data by users of those popular social media platforms.
'In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law,' Paxton said in a statement on Friday.
'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,' said Paxton.
'This $1.375 billion settlement is a major win for Texans' privacy and tells companies that they will pay for abusing our trust.'
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said the company did not admit any wrongdoing or liability in the settlement. The deal covers allegations related to the Chrome browser's incognito setting, disclosures related to location history on the Google Maps app, and biometric claims related to Google Photo. Read More Super Mario Bros Wonder game a 'notebook of chaos', critics say
Castaneda also said Google does not have to make any changes to products in connection with the settlement and that all of the policy changes that the company made in connection with the allegations were previously announced or implemented.
'This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,' Castaneda said.
'We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Atlantic
30 minutes ago
- Atlantic
One App to Rule Them All
If Google has its way, there will be no search bars, no search terms, no searching (at least not by humans). The very tool that has defined the company—and perhaps the entire internet—for nearly three decades could soon be overtaken by a chatbot. Last month, at its annual software conference, Google launched 'AI Mode,' the most drastic overhaul to its search engine in the company's history. The feature is different from the AI summaries that already show up in Google's search results, which appear above the usual list of links to outside websites. Instead, AI Mode functionally replaces Google Search with something akin to ChatGPT. You ask a question and the AI spits out an answer. Instead of sifting through a list of blue links, you can just ask a follow-up. Google has begun rolling out AI Mode to users in the U.S. as a tab below the search bar (before 'Images,' 'Shopping,' and the like). The company said it will soon introduce a number of more advanced, experimental capabilities to AI Mode, at which point the feature could be able to write a research report in minutes, 'see' through your smartphone's camera to assist with physical tasks such as a DIY crafts project, help book restaurant reservations, make payments. Whether AI Mode can become as advanced and as seamless as Google promises remains far from certain, but the firm appears to be aiming for something like an everything app: a single tool that will be able to do just about everything a person could possibly want to do online. Seemingly every major tech company is after the same goal. OpenAI markets ChatGPT, for instance, as able to write code and summarize documents, help shop, produce graphics, and, naturally, search the web. Elon Musk is notoriously obsessed with the idea of turning X into an everything app. Meta says you can use its AI 'for everything you need'; Amazon calls its new, generative AI–powered Alexa+ 'an assistant available to help any time you want'; Microsoft bills its AI Copilot as a companion 'for all you do'; and Apple has marketed Apple Intelligence and a revamped Siri as tools that will revolutionize how people use their iPhones (which encompass, for many users, everything). Even Airbnb, once focused simply on vacation rentals, is redesigning itself as a place where 'you can sell and do almost anything,' as its CEO, Brian Chesky, recently said. In a sense, everything apps are the logical conclusion of Silicon Valley's race to build artificial 'general' intelligence, or AGI. A bot smart enough to do anything obviously would be used to power a product that can, in effect, do anything. But such apps would also represent the culmination of the tech industry's aim to entrench its products in daily lives. Already, Google has features for shopping, navigation, data storage, work software, payment, travel—plus an array of smartphones, tablets, smart-home gadgets, and more. Apple has a similarly all-encompassing suite of offerings, and Meta's three major apps (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) each have billions of users. Perhaps the only thing more powerful than these sprawling tech ecosystems is boiling them all down to a single product. That these tech companies can even realistically have such colossal ambitions to build everything apps is a result of their existing dominance. The industry has spent years collecting information about our relationships, work, hobbies, and interests—all of which is becoming grist for powerful AI tools. A key feature of these everything apps is that they promise to be individually tailored, drawing on extensive personal data to provide, in theory, a more seamless experience. Your past search history, and eventually your emails, can inform AI Mode's responses: When I typed line up into AI Mode, I got the 'line up' for the day's New York Mets game (the Mets are my favorite baseball team). When I typed the same phrase into traditional Google Search, I got a definition. In other words, the rise of AI-powered everything apps is a version of the bargain that tech companies have proposed in the past with social media and other tools: our services for your data. Meta's AI assistant can draw on information from users' Facebook and Instagram accounts. Apple describes its AI as a 'personal intelligence' able to glean from texts, emails, and notes on your device. And ChatGPT has a new 'memory' feature that allows the chatbot to reference all previous conversations. If the technology goes as planned, it leads to a future in which Google, or any other Big Tech company, knows you are moving from Texas to Chicago and, of its own accord, offers to order the winter jacket you don't own to be delivered to your new apartment, already selected from your favorite brand, in your favorite color. Or it could, after reading emails musing about an Italian vacation, suggest an in-budget itinerary for Venice that best fits your preferences. There is, of course, no shortage of reasons to think that AI models will not be capable and reliable enough to power a true everything app. The Mets lineup that Google automatically generated for me wasn't entirely accurate. Chatbots still invent information and mess up basic math; concerns over AI's environmental harms and alleged infringement of intellectual-property rights could substantially slow the technology's development. Only a year ago, Google released AI Overviews, a search feature that told users to eat rocks and use glue to stick cheese to pizza. On the same day that Google released AI Mode, it also introduced an experimental AI shopping tool that can be easily used to make erotic images of teenagers, as I reported with my colleague Lila Shroff. (When we shared our reporting with the company, Google emphasized the protections it has in place and told us it would 'continue to improve the experience.') Maybe AI Mode will order something two sizes too large and ship to the wrong address, or maybe it'll serve you recommendations for Venice Beach. Despite these embarrassments, Google and its major AI competitors show no signs of slowing down. The promised convenience of everything apps is, after all, alluring: The more products of any one company you use, and the better integrated those products are, the more personalized and universal its everything app can be. Google even has a second contender in the race—its Gemini model, which, at the same conference, the company said will become a 'universal AI assistant.' Whether through Search or Gemini the company seems eager to integrate as many of its products and as much of its user data as possible. On the surface, AI and the everything app seem set to dramatically change how people interact with technology—consolidating and streamlining search, social media, officeware, and more into a chatbot. But a bunch of everything apps vying for customers feels less like a race for innovation and more like empires warring over territory. Tech companies are running the same data-hungry playbook with their everything apps as they did in the markets that made them so dominant in the first place. Even OpenAI, which has evolved from a little-known nonprofit to a Silicon Valley behemoth, appears so eager to accumulate user data that it reportedly plans to launch a social-media network. The technology of the future looks awfully reliant on that of the past.
Android Authority
41 minutes ago
- Android Authority
Google Maps on Android Auto is getting smarter about using all your vehicle's screens
TL;DR Google Maps has recently started offering a navigation pop-up on select instrument cluster displays. So far this has been spotted on the Polestar 2. We previously saw Waze delivering a similar behind-the-wheel view. How many digital screens can you see right this second? From our phones, to computers, to TVs and smart home hubs, our lives our just jam-packed with displays vying for our attention. And while that can easily start to get pretty overwhelming, this kind of preponderance of screens can also work to our benefit — if and when apps and services are making smart decisions about what to show, where. Right now, Google's working on pushing out just such an improvement to Android Auto. Just like so many other places in our lives, cars have been doubling down on their interest in screens in recent years. Beyond just offering one main screen on which we could interact with the car's own OS or use something like Android Auto, it's increasingly common to find vehicles that have additional display beyond that, with one especially popular option being a virtual instrument cluster display that lives right behind your steering wheel. Earlier this year we saw Waze learning to expand its navigation guidance to those cluster screens, and now we're learning about some similar efforts from Google Maps. Running Android Auto version 14.3.651844 on a Galaxy S25, 9to5Google reports that the Polestar 2 is now able to display Google Maps navigation data as a pop-up on its behind-the-wheel screen. This is distinct from the range and ETA view previously available through the car's Android Automotive interface. While this kind of functionality still appears to be incredibly limited across vehicles supporting Android Auto, that's a situation we only expect to get better, and it's nice to hear that Google's working to keep up with these trends. Placing navigation info front-and-center like this feels like a smart way to ensure that it's always easily within a driver's sight lines, helping to minimize distraction. That said, all this does feel a bit like a work in progress, and 9to5Google notes that the current implementation risks obscuring map detail with this pop-up in a way that could theoretically impair navigation. Hopefully we'll see Google play around a little more with its layout as we see this kind of view expand to more vehicles. Got a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at Email our staff at news@ . You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.
Newsweek
an hour ago
- Newsweek
John Cornyn's Chances of Losing Republican Primary After 20 Years: Poll
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn trailed conservative Attorney General Ken Paxton in another Senate primary poll released on Tuesday as Republican voters consider ousting the incumbent who first elected more than 20 years ago, though a Cornyn spokesperson told Newsweek the survey "doesn't pass the smell test." Why It Matters Cornyn's precarious standing in the Texas Republican primary demonstrates deep divides among the state's conservative voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections when Democrats are eyeing the seat as a potential flip in their quest to win back a Senate majority. It's the latest intraparty battle for Republicans as President Donald Trump, who is so far staying neutral in the race, has reshaped the party over the past decade. What to Know The latest poll, conducted by GOP pollster Robert Blizzard for the Educational Freedom Institute and reported by Punchbowl News, found Paxton leading Cornyn by 22 points. Fifty percent of respondents said they planned to vote for Paxton in the primary, while 28 percent said they planned to support Cornyn. Paxton's lead was fueled by his support among "very conservative" GOP voters, 60 percent of whom plan to vote for him compared to 22 percent backing Cornyn. Texas Senator John Cornyn speaks with reporters in Washington, D.C. on April 7, 2025. Texas Senator John Cornyn speaks with reporters in Washington, D.C. on April 7, poll surveyed 600 Republican primary voters from May 27 to May 28, 2025, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Patrick Flavin, professor and interim chair of political science at Baylor University, told Newsweek the poll is concerning for Cornyn because both candidates had high name recognition, so his polling deficit is not because voters are unfamiliar with him. Both candidates had overall positive favorability ratings among Republican primary voters, but Paxton's stood at 65/22, compared with Cornyn's 48/37, according to the poll. "I think Cornyn is probably suffering from what's a larger issue in Texas politics, which is the divide in the Republican Party between a more Trump-supporting version versus a more traditional, business version," he said. "Paxton and Cornyn perfectly characterize those two factions in the Republican Party." Cornyn, first elected in 2002, faces an "uphill battle" because he cannot run to the right of Paxton on key issues to win over those more conservative voters. Instead, he can hammer away at Paxton's legal and ethical scandals, though it's less clear that will resonate with Texas Republicans. Cornyn campaign senior adviser Matt Mackowiak dismissed the poll in a statement to Newsweek. "It's silly season for polling and this one takes the gold medal. A poll conducted by a longtime Paxton supporter doesn't pass the smell test. We remain confident that once Republican primary voters fully understand Ken Paxton's record of ethical failures, mismanagement and corruption, we will win this primary," he said. He noted the latest independent poll from the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center at Texas Southern University showed a closer race, with 43 percent of respondents backing Paxton and 34 percent supporting Cornyn. Twenty-three percent of that poll's respondents were unsure how they would vote. On the Democratic side, former Representative Colin Allred, who unsuccessfully challenged Senator Ted Cruz in the 2024 Senate race, has been floated as a potential candidate, though he has not formally said he plans to run. Trump carried Texas by 14 points in the 2024 presidential race, a stronger showing compared to his 2016 and 2020 elections when the state was decided by the single digits. Flavin said how competitive the race becomes in November could depend on whether Cornyn or Paxton emerge victorious from the primary. Cornyn has a record of outrunning other Republicans, such as in 2020 when he won reelection by a wider margin than Trump's victory in the state. But there is a "significant chunk of independent-leaning Republicans" who may be concerned about Paxton, Flavin said. "Paxton would still be favorite, but my prediction is it would be a much closer race if Paxton is the nominee just because of the polarizing views that people have about him," he said. What People Are Saying Paxton on X, formerly Twitter, on April 9: "For years, John Cornyn has betrayed President Trump and the America First movement. Texas deserves better, and that's why I'm running for U.S. Senate." President Donald Trump told reporters last month: "I like Paxton, I like Cornyn, they're both good people. So, I'll make a decision somewhere along the line. But you have two very good men." What Happens Next The Texas Senate GOP primary is scheduled for March 2026, leaving Cornyn with months to work to close the gap and reshape the race. Meanwhile, it's unclear if any other Republicans plan to jump into the race or who may run on the Democratic side. The Cook Political Report classifies the race as Solid Republican, meaning it is "not considered competitive" nor "likely to become closely contested."
