A U.S. federal jury determined on Wednesday that Alphabet’s Google must pay $425 million US for invading users’ privacy by continuing to collect data for millions of users who had switched off a tracking feature in their Google account.
The verdict comes after a trial in the Federal Court in San Francisco over allegations that Google over an eight-year period accessed users’ mobile devices to collect, save and use their data, violating privacy assurances under its Web and App Activity setting.
The users had been seeking more than $31 billion US in damages.
The jury found Google liable on two of the three claims of privacy violations brought by the plaintiffs. The jury found that Google had not acted with malice, meaning it was not entitled to any punitive damages.
A spokesperson for Google confirmed the verdict. Google had denied any wrongdoing.
The class-action lawsuit, filed in July 2020, claimed Google continued to collect users’ data even with the setting turned off through its relationship with apps such as Uber, Venmo and Meta’s Instagram that use certain Google analytics services.
At trial, Google said the collected data was “nonpersonal, pseudonymous, and stored in segregated, secured and encrypted locations.” Google said the data was not associated with users’ Google accounts or any individual user’s identity.
U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg certified the case as a class action covering about 98 million Google users and 174 million devices.
Google has faced other privacy lawsuits, including one earlier this year where it paid nearly $1.4 billion US in a settlement with Texas over allegations the company violated the state’s privacy laws.
Google in April 2024 agreed to destroy billions of data records of users’ private browsing activities to settle a lawsuit that alleged it tracked people who thought they were browsing privately, including in “incognito” mode.