Hashtag Trending, May 31, 2021 – $600M class-action lawsuit against Google; Iran bans cryptomining; Google’s collection of location data

A lawsuit against Google is given class action lawsuit status, Iran bans cryptomining after rolling power outages, and unedited documents show that Google has made it difficult to keep location data private.

It’s all the biz / tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Monday May 31st and I’m your host, Alex Coop.

Four women suing Google for wage discrimination had their lawsuit switched to a $ 600 million class action lawsuit based on technology

A lawsuit filed by four former Google employees alleging the advertising giant pays men higher wages for the same work was granted class action status last week. Judge Andrew Cheng of the California Supreme Court in San Francisco said plaintiffs – Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, Kelli Wisuri and Heidi Lamar – could not only take Google but also represent more than 10,800 women who may also be wrongly paid were fewer than their male counterparts at Internet Titan. According to The Register, the complaints were from women filed in 2017 looking for damages from Google, which due to its status could now grow to $ 600 million. The women argue that Google violated the California Equal Pay Act by failing to pay them full wages after they were fired or fired.

Iran bans crypto mining after months of technology blackouts

At a cabinet meeting last Wednesday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that enormous amounts of illegal Bitcoin mining were consuming a staggering 2 gigawatts of electricity every day from an already stressed power grid. Gizmodo reports that around 4.5 percent of global Bitcoin mining currently takes place in Iran. This makes Gizmodo one of the ten largest Bitcoin-producing countries in the world. The country is also a hotbed for illegal mining as miners use the country’s subsidized energy.

Google has made it nearly impossible for users to protect their location from technology

Finally, Business Insider reports that unedited documents in Arizona’s lawsuit against Google show that company executives and engineers were aware that the search giant had made it difficult for smartphone users to keep location information private. It also turns out that Google was collecting location data even after users turned off location sharing. They also made it difficult for users to find privacy settings. Insider says the documents even show that Google pressured phone manufacturers to keep privacy settings hidden because the settings were popular with users. A Google spokesman told The Verge that the lawsuit and the people who drive it “did everything possible to misrepresent our services. We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls over location data. We look forward to improving the record. “

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