Google GOOG 0.00%↑ has agreed to a $93 million settlement with the state of California over the company’s deceptive way they mislead users managing location data. As Location Business News has reported, the company has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to state governments to settle lawsuits over location privacy practices.
In this complaint, Google asked users to choose how much location data, or whether it could be used at all. The complaint said that users were told they could enhance their Google Maps experience.
The gist of many of the state’s complaints were that Google made false assurances that users would have their location history not stored if they turned it off. However, the company still used user location to target ads to them.
The company is shelling out the money, but is not admitting to any wrongdoing. The settlement calls for Google to be more transparent about location tracking and a number of other provisions.
Google Opens Access to Road Mapper
In other company news, Google has announced that it is seeking more contributors to its Road Mapper. Road Mapper, which is an invite-only platform, allows contributors to add missing features and roads to Google Maps.
The company said, in a blog post, that its contributors have mapped more than 1.5 kilometers of roads via Road Mapper, which started two years ago.
In a shot at Google, Hivemapper said it has mapped 50 million total kilometers via its crowdsourced mapping projects. In addition, its community has collected 3 billion street-level images (taking a shot at Meta META -0.14%↓, which has accumulated 1.8 billion images in 10 years via its Mapillary platform).
