Google is no stranger to lawsuits. In the past few years, it has paid up to $400 to each owner of the Nexus 6P, faced a $5 billion lawsuit for tracking user activity in incognito mode in Chrome, settled cases with former employees, and been fined $60 million in Australia for misleading customers about data privacy. Now, the federal court in San Francisco has ordered it to pay $425 million for violating user privacy.
Reuters reports that Google has been slapped with a $425 million fine in a class-action lawsuit that was opened back in 2020. Although the lawsuit covered 98 million people using 174 million Android devices, and was seeking $31 billion in damages, the fine is still a win for the plaintiffs of the class-action lawsuit. The reduced fine is due to the jury"s verdict which indicated that Google had not intentionally acted maliciously.
The lawsuit alleged that Google collected data across third-party partner apps like Uber and Venmo for over eight years, even when customers had disabled the "Web & App Activity" feature. Google"s argument was that this data was "nonpersonal, pseudonymous, and stored in segregated, secured, and encrypted locations", and was primarily utilized for better and more personalized user experiences.
The jury clearly found this to be a weak defense, and found Google liable on two of the three counts presented in the lawsuit. Google is obviously not pleased with the verdict, with a spokesperson telling the media outlet that users knew what they were agreeing to and knowingly consented to have their data collected:
This decision misunderstands how our products work. Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalization, we honor that choice.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs expressed their pleasure at the outcome, but Google plans to appeal the verdict at some point.