Court orders Google to pay $425 million for violating user privacy

A US federal court has ordered Google to pay $425 million in damages for privacy violations. According to the ruling, the company continued to collect data from millions of users even after they had turned off the tracking feature in their accounts. The BBC reports.

The court found Google guilty on two of the three counts, while the company’s actions were not qualified as malicious. The class action lawsuit was filed in July 2020 and affected about 98 million users and 174 million devices. The plaintiffs claimed that Google had access to their mobile devices and continued to collect, store and use data despite the disabled settings.

The lawsuit noted that similar practices affected hundreds of thousands of applications, including Uber and Lyft, Alibaba and Amazon marketplaces, as well as Meta social networks – Facebook and Instagram.

The company said the court’s decision distorts the principles of how Google products work. A representative of the corporation told the BBC that the company intends to appeal, emphasizing that users have tools to manage their data and their choices are respected.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, David Boyes, expressed satisfaction with the jury’s decision. In turn, Google clarified that when disabling the “Web & App History” function, information may be collected by services that use Google Analytics, but this data, according to the company, does not allow identifying specific users.

Against the background of the process, the paper of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, increased in price by more than 9%. This happened after a federal court ruled that the company is not obliged to sell the Chrome browser, but must provide competitors with more data.

Earlier it was reported that Google retained the ability to conclude agreements to install its search engine by default in third-party browsers. The corporation pays Apple about $26 billion to keep Google Search in Safari. For Mozilla, the developer of Firefox, such a partnership is critical to survival, as it provides the bulk of its revenue.