According to the California OAG press release: $93 million, plus injunctions which seem to be more about disclosures to users and internal oversight than actually allowing users to opt out of (or requiring opt-in consent before) tracking location. Not the most user-respecting outcome to say the least, though it could certainly have been worse.
Disclosure: I worked for Google more than 8 years ago, but not in any role related to this news story. I have no relevant inside information and I am certainly not speaking for Google here.
No, they made an order of magnitude mistake. Fairly common, it happens.
However, in this case it has taken it from “ordering bacon and avocado on my burger” to “two tickets to my local sports team including beers and chili cheese fries”. So not enough to be exactly punitive, more like a mild inconvenience. The point still stands.
i read long time ago how many apps are NOT using play services for location, like OSMAND~ and some other apps but what does the user loose if the navigation app doesnt use play location services?
i was talking to a cab aggregator last time and i said "oh i dont use your app because using it makes me enable google location which enables location sharing and i am not keen in doing that and i hear, beyond its privacy implications, you can avoid it".....
As I said, I last worked at Google more than 8 years ago, and I didn’t have a role relevant to this news story.
Therefore I don’t have any more insight to add in response to your question than the general public, with one exception:
I’ll note that Google is generally at least more technically able to honor the privacy promises it makes than a lot of small startups, such as robustly deleting data it claims to delete and giving you a lot of controls to request deletion of various categories of data.
Many startups do just enough lip service toward these compliance obligations to avoid negative financial, regulatory, or reputation consequences but don’t actually uphold their end of whatever they’re supposed to do (especially in places like the EU where strong privacy laws exist). Google goes well beyond that.
Clearly Google is far from perfect in privacy matters. I wish Google made stronger privacy promises and didn’t do dark patterns or deceptive explanations like what this settlement is punishing. But it’s easy to forget how much of the industry is worse than Google in these regards and how little of it is better, just because Google is so big and so prominent.
