Google told to pay $425m for invading users’ privacy

Google has been ordered to pay $425 million (£316 million) for invading users’ privacy.

A federal jury in San Francisco found that the tech giant continued to collect data for millions of people who had switched off a tracking feature in their Google account.

The data was harvested over eight years from apps including Uber, Venmo and Meta’s Instagram, which all use Google’s analytics services.

Users in the class-action lawsuit had been seeking more than $31 billion in damages.

However, the jury found that Google was liable on only two of the three allegations of privacy violations.

Google was not found by the jury to have acted with malice, so it was not liable to pay the claimants punitive damages.

Google claims data was ‘non-personal’ and ‘encrypted’

A spokesperson for Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc, confirmed the verdict. The company had denied any wrongdoing.

The lawsuit, filed in July 2020, claimed that the data gathering had breached Google’s privacy assurances under its Web & App Activity setting.

During the trial, Google said the data it collected was “non-personal, pseudonymous, and stored in segregated, secured, and encrypted locations”.

The company insisted the data was not connected to users’ Google accounts or any user’s identity.

US 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 in which it paid nearly $1.4 billion in a settlement with Texas over allegations the company violated the state’s privacy laws.

In April 2024, Google 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.

It comes after Google on Tuesday avoided being broken up in a monopoly case.

A US judge stopped short of demanding that the company offloads its Chrome browser or Android operating system – but Google was told to share data with its rivals.

Shares in Google were up more than 9.5pc on Wednesday.

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