Top 4 US Prosecutors Sue Google for its Fraudulent Behavior

Google has been sued by four top public prosecutors in the United States for allegedly collecting users’ location data fraudulently and selling it to various entities at exorbitant prices. These public prosecutors include the attorney generals of Washington, D.C, Indiana, Texas, and Washington State. The prosecutors said they had been investigating the case for three years after allegations of fraudulent collection and sale of user data against Google surfaced. 

Top 4 US Prosecutors Sue Google for its Fraudulent Behavior

The allegations were first made in 2018 by the Associated Press in a report. The report stated that despite shutting down the location service in Google’s Android operating system, Google Maps, Google Chrome, and all other Google products and services for smartphones, still it secretly monitored its users’ routes and locations. In this way, Google continues to collect location data, and deceive its users. Later, the same data is sold at exorbitant prices to various companies, ostensibly for “intelligent advertising”.

Google is reportedly making billions of dollars a year by fraudulently selling users’ location data. The lawsuit against Google has been filed in the Washington DC Supreme Court and if the allegations made against Google in the judicial investigation are proved to be true,

Google could be fined billions of dollars.

Similar lawsuits have been filed against Google in Australia and the US state of Arizona. Google, on the other hand, has denied the allegations in a statement issued Friday stating that “similar, baseless allegations concerning Google’s intelligence have been made more than once.”

Furthermore, it is pertinent to mention here that the current volume of the global business of buying and selling location data alone is 10 to 12 billion dollars annually. It is estimated that this volume will reach $31 billion annually by 2027 after continuous growth.

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