Texas vs. Google: privacy not a given?

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a comprehensive lawsuit against Google. He accuses Google of collecting and cataloging biometric data without obtaining consent – and compares Google’s facial recognition to Sauron’s eye in the lawsuit.

Biometric profiles without consent

At the heart of the lawsuit is the accusation that Google is creating biometric profiles without the consent of those affected. Such a practice violates Texas privacy laws. Specifically, in the lawsuit, Paxton refers to Google’s photo service, Google’s voice assistant program and the products of the smart home brand Nest, which is also part of Google’s Alphabet group.

With regard to the voice assistant program, it is pointed out that it records and processes the voices of all persons in the room – without obtaining the consent of all persons. This is necessary to be able to offer the voice-dependent personalization function: Google’s assistant varies in its functionality depending on personal settings and must therefore be able to recognize people – for which an evaluation of the voice is necessary. Consequently, Paxton’s accusation seems to be true here.

The other two specifically named programs offer a function that bundles photos according to persons depicted on them. This requires the use of a facial recognition function – and again, this is done without the explicit consent of all persons pictured. With regard to the camera of the Nest products, Paxton also points out in the statement of claim that it permanently scans the faces of all persons in its range and creates biometric profiles. Because of this function, he describes the camera as a “modern eye of Sauron. It permanently monitors the room and waits to identify familiar faces. Again, all of this is problematic because it also affects people who are not among the devices’ users and consequently never gave their consent for their faces to be scanned.

More and more lawsuits in the U.S.

Texas’ Attorney General Paxton is known for acting with maximum severity against tech corporations. In recent years, for example, he has already filed several far-reaching lawsuits against Google and Facebook. He has also taken action against Facebook for creating biometric profiles without consent. The state of Illinois had also opened a case based on this feature of Facebook, which ended with the company paying $650 million.

Google, meanwhile, already denied Paxton’s accusations. According to the Wall Street Journal , a spokesperson for the company said Paxton misrepresented how the products worked in the lawsuit.