Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has now filed suit against Google once more, alleging that they are violating Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act by systematically misleading and deceiving Texas consumers.
This law requires businesses in Texas to be truthful when representing their product and ownership, and Paxton claims that Google violated the section that bans businesses from keeping information from its users that might make them not want to purchase their product. The lawsuit goes on to state that the company deceived Texas consumers by tracking their personal locations even if the user had disabled the feature.
“Google’s founding motto is ‘Don’t Be Evil.’ And yet it systematically lies to millions of consumers in order to stack billions of dollars into its coffers,” said the Attorney General in a press release.
“Big Tech companies like Google continue to erode the American way of life and often break the law to maintain their overwhelming dominant market position. This lawsuit is just another part of my fight against Big Tech. I’ll hold Google accountable for misleading and deceiving Texas. This is not only an unethical invasion of privacy – it’s against the law,” he declared.
Paxton joins three other bipartisan attorneys general from Washington, Indiana, and District of Columbia in suing the company. Each lawsuit claims that Google had been deceiving its users from 2014-2019 and focuses particularly on Android users.
This is not the first time Paxton has dropped a lawsuit on Google, as just last week he sued them for allegedly asking local radio DJs to record personal endorsements for smartphone that they hadn’t used or been provided.
The lawsuit states that in October 2019, iHeartMedia was hired by Google to record advertisements for the Pixel 4, a Google-brand smartphone that had not yet been released.
Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesperson, has since called these claims “inaccurate.”
In a statement on Monday, Castaneda stated that the company had always built privacy features into their products and “provided robust controls for location data.” Castaneda concluded by saying that Google will continue to defend itself in order to set the record straight.