Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Google misled users about their privacy and now owes them $425m, says court (www.malwarebytes.com)

submitted 2 days ago by Zerush@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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A court ordered Google to pay $425 million after finding the company misled 98 million users about data collection through its "Web & App Activity" setting[^1]. The case revealed Google continued gathering user data via Firebase, a monitoring database embedded in 97% of top Android apps and 54% of leading iOS apps, even after users disabled data collection[^1].

Google's internal communications showed the company was "intentionally vague" about its data collection practices because being transparent "could sound alarming to users," according to district judge Richard Seeborg[^1].

This ruling adds to Google's recent privacy settlements, including:

$392 million paid to 40 states in 2023 for location tracking violations
$40 million to Washington state for similar location tracking issues
$1.38 billion to Texas in 2025 over location tracking and incognito mode claims[^1]

Google plans to appeal the $425 million verdict, with spokesperson Jose Castaneda stating "This decision misunderstands how our products work" and asserting that Google honors user privacy choices[^1].

[^1]: Malwarebytes - Google misled users about their privacy and now owes them $425m, says court

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[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Out of 50 FOSS apps (F-Droid) i use, none use googleanalytics, google-tagmanager or any other tracking framework. Some of them display a send bugreport popup on crash, which redirects to E-Mail.

Out of 5 proprietary apps i use (Aurora store in shelter profile), i see Adobe Experience Cloud, Appdynamics, Google Admob/Crashlytics, AltBeacon and those are some of the more tame apps.

Tested with TrackerControl and confirmed via App Manager.

In short, your claim is false. Are you maybe confusing things with LineageOS optionally using analytics?