A federal jury in San Francisco has ordered Google to pay $425 million in damages after finding the company violated user privacy by secretly tracking activity even when people had turned off their Web & App Activity setting.
The class-action lawsuit covered data collected between July 2016 and September 2024, impacting around 98 million users across 174 million devices. The jury ruled that Google was guilty of invasion of privacy and intrusion upon seclusion, though it rejected one additional claim.
Plaintiffs had sought over $31 billion, but the final award was limited to compensatory damages. The jury decided against punitive damages, saying there was no proof of malice in Google’s actions.
Google, however, disagrees with the verdict, arguing that its systems were transparent and that data was pseudonymized. The company has already announced plans to appeal the decision.
This ruling adds to Google’s growing list of privacy-related cases. Earlier this year, the company settled with Texas for $1.375 billion over biometric and location tracking violations. Google also agreed in April 2024 to delete billions of browsing records in another lawsuit involving Incognito mode.
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