Arizona AG sues Google for allegedly collecting Android user location data even when users had turned digital tracking off
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sued Google on Wednesday, alleging the tech giant violated its users' privacy by collecting information about their whereabouts …
Context & Ripple Effects
Brnovich's suit converts an inquiry into an enforcement action: his office had opened its investigation of Google's location practices back in September 2018, days after the Washington Post report that revealed Android kept collecting whereabouts even with tracking toggled off.
Arizona did not act alone for long. Australia's competition regulator filed its own misleading-conduct case over Android location settings, and the Federal Court there later ruled Google misled users about what turning off location history meant — a finding that foreshadowed where Brnovich's claim was headed before it settled for $85 million in 2022.
First-order effects
- Google now faces state consumer-protection litigation alleging its targeted-advertising pipeline ran on location data gathered from Android users who believed they had disabled tracking.
- Brnovich gains a marquee test of whether state attorneys general can police privacy disclosures that federal authorities left unaddressed.
Second-order effects
- The same conduct drew parallel action abroad — the ACCC's suit and the Australian Federal Court's mislead-consumers ruling forced Google to defend identical Android settings claims across jurisdictions rather than containing the dispute to one US state.
- Every 'off' switch on Android becomes potential evidence, raising the disclosure burden on how Google explains Web & App Activity versus Location History to users.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consent toggles harden into legally binding permission boundaries: courts treat a disabled setting as a contractual promise, making surreptitious fallback collection actionable under consumer-protection law rather than merely bad optics.
The trend: Consumer-protection regulators are turning privacy toggles into enforceable legal commitments, with state AGs and foreign courts converging on the same Android location-collection playbook.