Google has agreed to shell out $8 million to Texas over deceptive ads it made when promoting its Pixel 4 smartphone, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Friday.
The complaint stemmed from Google hiring radio DJs "to record and broadcast detailed testimonials” about their usage of the Pixel 4. The trouble is, the search giant “refused to provide the DJs with a phone for them to use,” Paxton said.
The settlement comes months after Google and iHeartMedia agreed to pay $9.4 million to settle Federal Trade Commission lawsuits about the same issue.
Google paid iHeartRadio to disseminate the misleading endorsements and provided scripts for radio DJs to read that said: “It’s my favorite phone camera out there, especially in low light, thanks to Night Sight Mode,” and “It’s also great at helping me get stuff done, thanks to the new voice-activated Google Assistant that can handle multiple tasks at once.”
In announcing the Texas settlement, Attorney General Paxton said: “Texas will do whatever it takes to protect our citizens and our state economy from corporations’ false and misleading advertisements. If Google is going to advertise in Texas, their statements better be true,” adding the tech giant “made statements that were blatantly false, and our settlement holds Google accountable for lying to Texans for financial gain.”
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda told PCMag: “We are pleased to resolve this issue. We take compliance with advertising laws seriously and have processes in place designed to help ensure we follow relevant regulations and industry standards.”
Google has been in hot water with US states before. Last year, Google reached a deal with 40 states for $392 million over its location-tracking practices. That settlement closed a long legal wrangling that began after an 2018 AP report found that on both Android phones and iPhones, hitting pause on Google’s “Location History” feature did not actually turn off location tracking.
And in another case, Texas sued Google in 2022 for the “unlawful” capturing and use of the biometric data of millions of Texans “without properly obtaining their informed consent.”
