Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Google, alleging the tech giant is harvesting facial and other data on Texans to store long into the future for any purpose it chooses without anyone’s informed consent.
The lawsuit targets Google Photos, Google Assistant and Nest Hub Max, according to a news release from Paxton’s office on Thursday.
“Google’s indiscriminate collection of the personal information of Texans, including very sensitive information like biometric identifiers, will not be tolerated,” the Republican attorney general said in a statement. “I will continue to fight Big Tech to ensure the privacy and security of all Texans.”
José Castañeda, a Google spokesman, said in a statement that Paxton “is once again mischaracterizing our products in another breathless lawsuit,” according to The New York Times.
“We will set the record straight in court,” he said.
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The lawsuit says Google stores images of every photo for its own use, regardless of whether anyone in the photo has agreed to this. The prime interest of the tech giant in doing this has been to advance its services and reap more profits, the lawsuit said, noting that vast privacy issues exist when Google holds an extensive amount of information on people, particularly children.
“Google has, since at least 2015, collected biometric data from innumerable Texans and used their faces and their voices to serve Google’s commercial ends. Indeed, all across the state, everyday Texans have become unwitting cash cows being milked by Google for profits,” the lawsuit said.
“Google has now spent years unlawfully capturing the faces and voices of both non-consenting users and non-users throughout Texas — including our children and grandparents, who simply have no idea that their biometric information is being mined for profit by a global corporation,” it said.
The lawsuit focuses on a facial recognition feature called “Face Grouping” in Google Photos.
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“The technology works by first detecting all faces depicted in a photo or video loaded into Google Photos,” the lawsuit says. “When Google detects an…
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