Unsealed court docs: Google engineers admitted knowing and discussing that the company's location privacy app settings were confusing and could be misleading
Users could make change, but it was “difficult enough that people won't,” one employee wrote. — Newly unsealed and partially …
Ars TechnicaKate Cox
Context & Ripple Effects
This filing lands mid-battle: Australia's competition regulator had already sued Google in October 2019 over allegedly misleading Android location-data settings (the ACCC's complaint), and Wired had reported months earlier that Google's much-touted privacy push left settings users still found baffling (that 2019 privacy-settings report).
What the unsealed documents add is the internal record — engineers acknowledging in writing that the settings were confusing and 'difficult enough that people won't' change them. That converts a regulator's allegation into documented internal knowledge, which is exactly the kind of evidence deception cases turn on.
First-order effects
The ACCC gains contemporaneous internal admissions that its misleading-conduct claim lacked: Google can no longer frame confusion as user error when its own engineers flagged it.
Google's parallel public positioning — that it was making privacy controls easier to find — is directly undercut by documents showing deliberate difficulty.
Second-order effects
Later-unsealed material shows the pattern extended beyond Google's own settings, with pressure on hardware partners like LG to bury off-toggles too — widening the pool of devices and users implicated in the same conduct.
A win by the ACCC would hand other regulators a template: sue over interface design itself, not just data collection, forcing every platform vendor to audit how hard its opt-outs are to find.
Third-order effects
If courts keep treating deliberately buried controls as misleading conduct, 'dark pattern' design stops being a UX choice and becomes a legal liability across the industry — with the eventual Australian Federal Court finding that Google misled users who turned location history off (that April 2021 ruling) pointing the way.
Privacy settings become a compliance surface: expect vendors to document design intent internally as carefully as they document data flows, because the former is now discoverable evidence.
The trend: Regulators are shifting from policing what data companies collect to policing how hard companies make it to say no.
Two relevant tidbits from this litigation: — Google user privacy settings confuse Google privacy engineers. — employee admits: “In fact, our landmark privacy policy came into existence pretty much for the very reason of enabling cross-product data use.” https://www.azmirror.com/.…
Boom. Aug 3rd, we quietly filed in Phoenix courts to have docs unsealed in State of Arizona vs. Google. Our argument was public interest, Google had undermined consumer trust and transparency helps other proceedings. Our friends at News Media Alliance co-signed with @DCNorg. /1 h…
Even *Google software engineers* were confused about how to turn off location tracking in their services, according to newly unsealed documents. How can anyone expect regular people to navigate this maze of dark patterns and obfuscation? https://www.azmirror.com/... https://twitt…
A privacy engineer at Google in internal emails: “Speaking as a user, WTF? More specifically I **thought** I had location tracking turned off on my phone.” https://www.azmirror.com/...
This bleak assessment of Google's privacy settings from its own engineer says a lot: “The current UI feels like it is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won't figure it out.” https://www.cnet.com/... https://twitter.com/...
In the current legal/media climate, it's arguably irresponsible to discuss business strategy trade offs outside an encrypted chat. https://arstechnica.com/...
The confusion over what location data is still tracked even after you turn off your GPS had one Google engineer worried about geofence warrants, calling it the “wrongful-arrest lottery” https://www.cnet.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Apple does a very good job of making location and privace settings clear and accessible. I hope more companies follow suit and don't use dark patterns to make users feel safe while their data is still being used in ways they don't want. https://twitter.com/...
“More specifically I **thought** I had location tracking turned off on my phone,” the unnamed software engineer said in the released chat logs. “So our messaging around this is enough to confuse a privacy focused Google software engineer. That's not good.” https://www.azmirror.co…
Internal documents also showed that Google has known its privacy settings were confusing since at least 2014. Four years later, the problem persisted, with one staffer saying “the real failure is that we shipped a UI that confuses users” https://www.cnet.com/... https://twitter.c…