Google Employees Found Privacy Settings Confusing

By 2018, Google mastered the art of obscuring privacy settings to the degree that even some Google employees didn’t know how location privacy settings worked, according to an Arizona consumer fraud lawsuit (now with fewer redactions) shows. As the Arizona Mirror first noticed, the complaint contains messages between Googlers venting that the company’s privacy settings are— even for the exact people most likely to understand them—a “mess.” The suit, filed in May, alleges that Google had violated Arizona’s Consumer Fraud Act on numerous counts, using “deceptive and unfair business practices” to gather users’ information and location data.