SAN FRANCISCO/PARIS: Alphabet’s Google was told by a federal jury in the US on Wednesday to pay $425 million for invading users’ privacy and slapped with a fine of 325 million euros ($381 million) in France for a similar offense.
The jury found the tech giant of guilty of violations 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 & App Activity setting.
The users had been seeking more than $31 billion 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.
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 where it paid nearly $1.4 billion 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.
In France, the data protection authority Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) said ordered Google to pay 325 million euros ($381 million) for improperly displaying ads to Gmail users and using cookies, both without Google account users’ consent.
The CNIL also gave Google six months to ensure ads are no longer displayed between emails in Gmail users’ inboxes without prior consent, and that users give valid consent to the creation of a Google account for the placement of ad trackers.
Failing that, Google and its Irish subsidiary would both have to pay a penalty of 100,000 euros per day of delay, CNIL said in a statement.
A Google spokesperson said the company was reviewing the decision and said that users have always been able to control the ads they see in their products.
In the past two years, Google has made updates to address the commission’s concerns, including an easy way to decline personalized ads when creating a Google account, and changes to the way ads are presented in Gmail, the spokesperson said.
