Jury tells Google to pay $425 mln over app privacy
WASHINGTON
A U.S. federal jury has ordered Google to pay about $425 million for gathering information from smartphone app use even when people opted for privacy settings.
"This case is about Google's illegal interception of consumers' private activity on consumer mobile apps," attorneys for the plaintiffs charged in a class action suit filed in July 2020.
The jury verdict came at the end of a trial in San Francisco, and a day after a federal judge in Washington, DC, handed the internet giant a victory by rejecting the government's demand that Google sell its Chrome web browser as part of a major antitrust case.
"This decision misunderstands how our products work, and we will appeal it," Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement. "Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalization, we honor that choice."
In the smartphone app privacy suit, plaintiffs argued that Google intercepted, tracked, collected and sold users' mobile app activity data regardless of what privacy settings they chose.
"Google's privacy promises and assurances are blatant lies," the plaintiffs' attorneys said in the lawsuit.
Google has long been under pressure to balance targeting money-making ads at the heart of its financial success with protecting the privacy of users.
France's data protection authority on Sept. 3 issued record fines against Google and fast-fashion platform Shein for failing to respect the law on internet cookies.
The two groups, each with tens of millions of users in France, received two of the heaviest penalties ever imposed by the CNIL watchdog: 150 million euros ($175 million) for Shein and 325 million euros for Google.
