In 2022, Attorney General Paxton sued Google for unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data. After years of aggressive litigation, Attorney General Paxton agreed to settle Texas’s data-privacy claims against Google for an amount that far surpasses any other state’s claims for similar violations. To date, no state has attained a settlement against Google for similar data-privacy violations greater than $93 million. Even a multistate coalition that included forty states secured just $391 million—almost a billion dollars less than Texas’s recovery.
This is a settlement… Meaning that Google figures not that this amount is less than they would pay if it went to court and they lost. Since there is no way they’d be spending a billion dollars on defending this in court, they know they would definitely lose, and paying an insanely high penalty is the best outcome for them.
And this way they likely don’t have to stop using the information they have, which is worth way more than that since they don’t have to admit to any wrongdoing this way.