By Jerod McDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
An Arizona judge says that the state has collected more than enough material from tech behemoth Google and it’s time to move onto a trial over the company’s privacy policy.
Eleven months after he first said the state’s case could move to a trial, Judge Timothy Thomason said last week that the state needs to quit asking for even more documents from Google, a process known as discovery.
“This Court has concern that no amount of discovery is going to be sufficient for the State and that the State will always want more,” he wrote. “Common sense has arguably gone by the wayside.”
The case, filed early last year, is part of a larger investigation by the Arizona attorney general that has been going on since at least 2018, after an Associated Press article revealed certain Google applications store location data without asking, and that deleting the data is a time-intensive process. AP found that Google Maps, for example, creates a snapshot of where users are whenever they open the application, even with location history turned off.
In January, the judge denied the state’s request to issue a judgement against Google without a trial, saying it should go before jurors. But that process has been slow.
