Google is close to a deal to pay USD 22.5 million to settle charges over its privacy settings on Apple devices, officials briefed on the settlement terms told the Wall Street Journal. This would be the largest penalty ever levied on a single company by the US Federal Trade Commission. The case involves Google's use of code to trick Apple's Safari browser into letting it monitor users that had blocked such tracking. Google disabled the code after being contacted by the WSJ, which first wrote about Google's practices in February. Google claims tracking of Apple users was inadvertent and didn't cause any harm to consumers.
Google's practices triggered an FTC investigation into whether the company had violated an earlier agreement with the regulator on privacy protection, which dates from October 2011 and followed privacy violations on Google Buzz. In that agreement, Google agreed not to misrepresent its privacy practices to consumers. In the latest settlement, the FTC is expected to allege that Google violated the terms of the Buzz agreement when it bypassed Apple users' privacy settings, the paper said.
