Unedited court documents in a lawsuit involving Google have alleged that the tech giant reportedly knew that it was difficult for smartphone users to keep location information private. The search giant’s seeming deliberate privacy breach, the court documents further revealed, was common knowledge to Google’s top executives and engineers. Google continued to collect users’ location data even after they had turned off location sharing on their devices.

Another accusation is that the company specifically made privacy settings difficult to find. Furthermore, Google was alleged to have also pressured phone manufacturers to hide privacy settings because users regularly activated the settings.

The lawsuit was filed by the US state of Arizona against Google, alleging that the company secretly breached user privacy by illegally tracking Android users’ location without their consent. The Arizona State Attorney General, Mark Brnovich filed the lawsuit in 2020 on behalf of the state. It also alleged that Google kept the location tracking feature running in the background for some features on their Android devices even after users had disabled it.

Among the reliefs sought by Brnovich is for the court to force Google to pay back profits accruable to it from monetizing the collected privacy data through ads that were served on Arizona residents. If found guilty, Google may also be subjected to Arizona fraud laws that stipulate up to $10,000 in fines for each violation.

The Arizona lawsuit is yet another of the company’s legal tangles it continues to grapple with in recent years. Google, however, is accusing the Arizona Attorney General and its competitors of trying to mischaracterize its services. Google’s spokesperson Jose Castaneda insists that the company had always built privacy features into its products and provided robust controls for location data. The company hopes the present case will help it to set the records straight on the accusations leveled against it.

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