On January 24, attorneys general from Indiana, Texas, Washington State and Washington, DC, filed separate lawsuits against Google, alleging that the search giant makes it “nearly impossible” for people to stop their location from being tracked. They also accused the company of deceiving users and invading their privacy. They cited Google’s use of a practice known as “dark patterns” to prevent people from protecting their privacy, a practice that was recently forbidden in Europe under the EU’s Digital Services Act. Meanwhile, in November, Facebook said it would shut down its facial recognition system and delete the face-scan data of more than one billion users. Yet this did not stop Texas’s attorney general from filing a lawsuit last month against Meta, saying the company had already violated the state’s privacy laws by capturing biometric data on tens of millions of Texans for more than a decade without properly obtaining consent. Both Google and Facebook now find themselves under legal scrutiny thanks to their surreptitious use of tracking, monitoring and surveillance technologies. These cases highlight the extent of surveillance activities by the two tech giants, but it is also just a drop in the bucket of what’s occurring worldwide today.