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August 26, 2020 02:44 pm

Unredacted Suit Shows Google's Own Engineers Confused By Privacy Settings

schwit1 writes: Newly unsealed and partially unredacted documents from a consumer fraud suit the state of Arizona filed against Google show that company employees knew and discussed among themselves that the company's location privacy settings were confusing and potentially misleading. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich's office launched its own investigation following the AP report, and in May 2020 the state sued Google, alleging that the company violated the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act. The new version of the suit includes a number of employee emails and chat logs where Google employees agreed with the AP story, and these employees highlighted their own frustrations with the settings. Among the highlights:"The current UI feels like it is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won't figure it out.""Some people (including even Googlers) don't know that there is a global switch and a per-device switch.""Indeed we aren't very good at explaining this to users. Add me to the list of Googlers who didn't understand how this worked and was surprised when I read the article ... we shipped a UI that confuses users.""I agree with the article. Location off should mean location off, not except for this case or that case.""Speaking as a user, WTF?" another employee said, in additional documentation obtained by the Arizona Mirror. "More specifically I **thought** I had location tracking turned off on my phone. So our messaging around this is enough to confuse a privacy focused (Google software engineer). That's not good."

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