Australia: the off switch that wasn’t¶

In August 2022 the Federal Court of Australia ordered Google to pay 60 million Australian dollars after the competition regulator, the ACCC, showed it had misled Android users about how their location was collected.

The switch that did nothing¶

Google told some users that “Location History”, once switched off, was the only setting that governed whether their location was collected. A second setting, “Web and App Activity”, also collected location data, and it was turned on by default. Switching off the obvious control left the other one running. The conduct ran from January 2017 to December 2018 and reached about 1.3 million Australian accounts before the screens were corrected.

A dark pattern with a court behind it¶

This is the consent theatre the landscape describes, with a judgment attached rather than a guidance note. A control that looked complete was not, and a collecting setting sat on by default where few would think to look. The regulator’s point was plain: some users would have chosen differently had the screen told the truth, which is the whole value of an honest control and the whole cost of a misleading one.

The pattern¶

The phone is the vector and location the asset, but the move was not in the collection. It was in the settings that described it. What a person switched off was not what was switching them on.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-16.