Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood is working on the lawsuit, and he told CNBC that user data privacy efforts from Google’s parent company will be questioned.
“They [Google] control the pipeline and have the duty to protect that information as well as these other smaller companies,” Mr. Hood told CNBC. “I [want to] see us do some things like, you know, if you download an app, for example, you have to opt in to allow them to mine your data.”
In a statement emailed to CNBC, Google said: “Privacy and security are built into all of our products, and we will continue to engage constructively with state Attorneys General on policy issues.”
The lawsuit will resemble the federal case against Microsoft in the 1990s, Mr. Hood said. In the Microsoft case, the federal government charged the tech company with limiting competition on PCs, serving as a monopoly with its Windows 98 operating system and Internet Explorer web browser, according to the report. Despite the lawsuit, Microsoft was not ordered to split up, but the company’s growth slowed down over the next 15 years.
More articles on cybersecurity:
Healthcare gets a pulse check: 5 survey findings
Arizona Medicaid alerts 3,100 enrollees of privacy breach
Physician notes, medical info exposed after tech company fax server error
