Google to pay Indiana $20M to resolve privacy suit | Hacker News Reader

Google to pay Indiana $20M to resolve privacy suit

apnews.com

66 pointsTerretta38 comments

To folks who are saying this isn't enough or that we need to put executives in jail: you are all thinking from a systems/framer perspective and not from how the law actually works.

The law says it actually has to be violated for damages to come into play, and then those damages need to be reliably proven. It's very hard or impossible to show hard, quantifiable economic harm from someone storing your geolocation data on a server. This is why the settlement isn't huge - though to be clear imo this is a fairly large settlement.

If you made $200k/year and then were told you had to pay $20 to settle a lawsuit with the state of Indiana, because of some questionable charge, would you pay it or fight it? That's the scale of this if Google were a person.

Because the state of Indiana is so anti-tax that it can no longer fund their own government through taxes alone, lawsuits like this become important sources of revenue.

As a resident of Indiana, our state is generally in fine financial shape. Looking at Illinois and Michigan to either side, I would 10000% take the financial situation in my state. Illinois is a pension time bomb. Michigan can’t support their infrastructure.

As a person who has driven on rt 275 past Lawrenceburg, I'm rather surprised to hear this. That stretch of road is apocalyptic

Almost every state has a meme “well this sure beats <my state> roads”

Heard it in Illinois. Heard it in Indiana. Heard it in Michigan. Everyone thinks their state roads are terrible.

The truth is, some little side roads don’t get much love in all states. We honestly built up too much roads, and it would bankrupt all states to care for all of these roads. The answer is to drop some roads, and covert others to gravel or dirt. But doing this is political suicide, so no one does this… so we just have some little roads and little bridges in real bad shape.

You could just have a criminal statue, and then it's not a question of damages.

> To folks who are saying this isn't enough or that we need to put executives in jail: you are all thinking from a systems/framer perspective and not from how the law actually works

And I think they're talking about how the law should work. Obviously currently it doesn't work well enough as a deterrent, and is more of a "costs of doing business". Thankfully laws are mutable and can be updated to be more appropriate.

That's about $3 per person in Indiana. They must not have been able to demonstrate much harm if they're willing to settle for so little.

Which I personally find unfortunate. I loathe location tracking and wish these penalties had real teeth.

> They must not have been able to demonstrate much harm if they're willing to settle for so little.

They probably had the cops put in a good word for how useful they find the tracking. I'm sure that didn't hurt.

Or anyone, who used the trafic overlay in google maps to spot traffic jam.

But the simple cops don't really have access to googles internal data.

I assume when the cops show up with a subpoena that they get all of what Google has for the given set of parameters so I think Google's "shadow" location data that they use for traffic and other internal stuff would probably show.

No monetary penalty has teeth. Unless the corporate veil is pierced and executives go to prison it’s just one more ordinary business expense.

Edit: the US constitution has an extradition clause[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_Clause

I suspect that would result in low level employees getting scapegoated.

It's important to evaluate the realities of how laws will work in practice, not just what we want ideally to happen. A corporation is a legal and tax framework, it might be difficult to tack on such a law without fundamentally changing how corporations operate.

But this has been debate to death on HN, which is why I suspect you're being downvoted.

That’s not how business works. If the cost outweighs the benefit you adapt or fail. Most companies fail without anyone going to prison.

Why not have no cap and cause significant damage to the company. Would that be so bad? Would they all flee the country?

Edit: it just occured to me that there are normal people out there just like me only super wealthy and just bribing politicians like it's nothing. It's nuts on a societal level. Imagine being so selfish.

Is there a cap? I actually have no idea how this amount was determined. It seems too low to persuade Google to change their ways but that's just like, my opinion, man.

How much would it take for Google to change their business practices? Say there was a tax on holding and using personal information. At what point does Google say "this isn't worth it"?

Regarding the edit: is there anything to indicate that they're anything like you and me? Is hoarding resources in such excessive quantities at the cost of so many others not tantamount to a personality disorder?

So what does Indiana do when the executives are not based in Indiana? Arrest whichever employees they can get their hands on?

Apple did a bad thing, but Tim Cook is hard to get, so just pop down to the Apple Store and arrest the manager until a trade can be arranged?

Issue an arrest warrant. There is reciprocity across the nation.

I'm not so sure....if the monetary penalty is so great that it cancels out the monetary gain from tracking, Google won't do it. It probably would have teeth if unauthorized tracking for any FAANG company was $20 billion dollars.

Yes, fines should be leveled against FAANG in "billybucks" - billions of dollars. As in, "Today Google got fined 5 billybucks for privacy violations."

Does anyone have an idea of the value Google themselves place on individual location data? Is $3.00 within an order of magnitude?

Note that they pay Apple $15B a year just to be default search in a browser HN considers as having almost no share. Here are actual stats though:

Considering Apple iPhone’s high user rate in the United States, it is no wonder that Safari, the browser pre-installed on every iPhone, is also widely used. When it comes to the overall browser market, however, Safari’s leading status gets lost: Chrome is the number one internet browser in the United States with a market share of about 50 percent, while Safari trails as a second with around 35 percent share. Safari lags even further behind in the desktop browser market, with only around 18 percent share. This correlates to Apple’s standing in the PC market: ranked as number four in the market as of the third quarter of 2021, Apple’s Mac computers enjoy a relatively niche yet loyal user group. With a nearly 60 percent share, Chrome is the dominating figure in the U.S. desktop browser market.

> in a browser HN considers as having almost no share

There's no need to attack strawmen, iOS Safari is clearly the winner in the US's mobile market: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/unite...

That number is even more skewed for iOS users specifically, which is a very useful demographic for marketers. I've worked on US eCommerce sites whose entire site traffic was >80% iOS Safari users. The payment is high, but render unto Caesar.

Not only that, but the overall amount is chump change to Google. The people at Google likely settled with the widest possible grin on their faces. They know the settlement was of little consequence and lacking in deterrence.

https://apnews.com/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb

We changed the URL from https://events.in.gov/event/attorney_general_todd_rokita_sec... to a third party article with a bit more background. If there's a better source, we can change it again.

FWIW, the URL I was originally submitting was:

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3794301-google-to-pay-...

I changed it to the release instead of the third party backgrounder, but had kept the article title:

"Google has agreed to pay $29.5M to settle lawsuits with Washington DC and Indiana over location tracking practices, after agreeing to pay ~$392M to 40 US states" -- Jared Gans / The Hill

Bypass: https://archive.is/Y6Eky

Not sure why I got access denied... (Cloudflare Error 1020)

this is a cited Associated Press article that is credited for starting the ball rolling https://archive.is/QtVvs

Ironically, despite the fact that I run into Cloudflare blocks frequently, I could read the original article. On the other hand, your archive.is link does result in a CF block for me.

I think this headline gave me a stroke. They're settling for 29M with DC and Indiana, but -392M with other states? What does settling for negative money mean, the states pay Google?

Also the details in the headline aren't in the article. The article doesn't mention "392M", nor DC.

i've started researching my next phone without google services (Or strictly limited). Probably going with grapheneOS.

Googles entire business is to track us and sell ads. So they're never going to change.

As a user of GrapheneOS, I strongly recommend. I did a few tests to check that it is doing what it claims, and as far as I can tell it is, and better than I expected. I will be staying with GrapheneOS for the foreseeable future.

What kind of deterrent effect does a -$392M settlement have?

Article and agreement say $20,000,000. Am I missing something?

I think OP article is about a subset of a larger federal-level settlement mentioned that was announced in November 2022:

> NOVEMBER 14, 2022: Attorney General Josh Shapiro Announces $391 Million Settlement with Google Over Location Tracking Practices [1]

[1]: https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/attorney-gener...

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