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A US federal jury has ordered Google to pay $425 million (£317m) for continuing to collect data from millions of users after they turned on a key privacy setting.
The decision in San Francisco federal court ended a class-action lawsuit filed in July 2020 in which plaintiffs argued Google over an eight-year period accessed users’ mobile devices to collect, save and use their data, even though they had turned off Google’s Web & Activity setting.
The jury found Google liable for two of the three claims brought by the class action, including invasion of privacy and intrusion upon seclusion, but said Google had not acted with malice, meaning it was not liable for punitive damages.
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The plaintiffs had originally sought more than $31bn in damages.
The Web & Activities setting, found in users’ Google accounts, is presented as a control for how Google uses a wide range of data, including searches, physical location, activity on third-party sites, apps and devices, to personalise advertisements.
The plaintiffs argued that even when users turned off the setting, Google continued to collect the same data through hundreds of thousands of smartphone apps that use Google analytics services, including Uber, Lyft, Alibaba, Amazon, Instagram and Facebook.
Google acknowledged in court that it did so, but said the data was no longer associated with users’ Google accounts or an individual user’s identity. It argued that users understood that this was how the setting worked.
The data was “nonpersonal, pseudonymous, and stored in segregated, secured, and encrypted locations”, Google said during the trial.
The company said it plans to appeal.
It said in a statement provided to Silicon UK that the Web & Activities setting merely turns off personalisation, with Google continuing to collect data and treat it pseudonymously, and that users “knew and consented” to this.
“This decision misunderstands how our products work,” stated Google spokesman Jose Castaneda.
Monopoly trial
David Boies, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said they were “very pleased” with the verdict.
The case was certified by US District Judge Richard Seeborg as a class action covering about 98 million Google users and 174 million devices.
Earlier this year Google was found to have an illegal monopoly on digital advertising technology, and faces a trial later this month on remedies.
In July, a California state jury found that Google had misused the cellular data of Android users by sending and receiving information on their devices while they were idle, constituting “mandatory and unavoidable burdens” for Android users that were “for Google’s benefit”, ordering the company to pay $314.6m to Android users resident in the state.
The decision could have broader implications in the US, as a parallel case is pending in San Jose federal court that applies to Android users in the country’s other 49 states.
The class action case, which was filed in state court in 2019, was based on the argument that under California law phone users’ cellular data is their property, and is subject to conversion, a civil cause of action that involves taking a person’s property without permission.
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