Google Asked to Pay Additional $2.36 Billion in Privacy Class Action
Google should pay $2.36 billion in addition to a $425 million verdict handed down against it over privacy right violations in September, a group of consumers said Wednesday. That amount is the “net profits attributable to Google’s collection and use of [their] data during the class period,” they said in a court filing. The case began with a complaint in July 2020.
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“If Google is allowed to keep these profits, the lesson it and other tech companies will learn from this long litigation is this: privacy torts are sound business decisions; consumers and courts are powerless to stop them; and the cost of defending lawsuits like this one are just ‘judicial expenses’ to be budgeted for and incurred along the way,” the consumers' filing said.
Additionally, they asked the U.S. District Court for Northern California to permanently block Google from collecting Supplemental Web & App Activity data when users had toggled the feature off, with an independent third party monitoring their compliance; delete the data it had already collected; and dismantle the algorithms, models, and services created using the data.
Case 3:20-cv-04688 began in 2020 with a class-action complaint in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, where the plaintiffs said Google invaded users' privacy and violated the law by intercepting, tracking, collecting and selling browsing history and activity data, regardless of the privacy setting consumers chose.
On Sept. 4, the jury found the plaintiffs proved invasion of privacy and intrusion upon seclusion, and that Google didn't prove that it had user consent as a defense against the charges. Google said it would appeal the ruling (see 2509040049).