Attorneys for the plaintaff argued the case is about Google's 'illegal interception of consumers' private activity'.
Google has been dealt a blow after a US federal jury ordered the search giant to pay about $425 million for gathering information from smartphone app use, even when people opted for privacy settings.
The verdict on Wednesday 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.
Law suit
Attorney for the plaintiffs charged in a class action suit filed in July 2020 argued that the case was about “Google’s illegal interception of consumers’ private activity on consumer mobile applications (apps).”
Google said the decision “misunderstands how our products work, and we will appeal it.”
“Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalisation, we honour 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.
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Under pressure
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.
The Silicon Valley giant has been striving to replace online activity tracking “cookies” with a mechanism less invasive but equally effective.
Cookies
In July last year, Google said it was reversing a long-planned move to ditch third-party cookies − a critical way for advertisers to track consumers’ web activity.
Instead of replacing cookies with Google’s Privacy Sandbox, a system that was meant to develop a profile on a person’s likes and dislikes for advertisers without needing to rely on a trove of browsing and search history, the company allowed Chrome users to opt out of third-party tracking cookies entirely.
Cookies are small files saved to browsers by websites that can collect data about users’ online activity, making them essential to online advertising and the business models of many large platforms.
Google and Shein
Meanwhile, France’s data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), on Wednesday 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, according to AFP
Both Google and Shein failed to secure users’ free and informed consent before setting advertising cookies on their browsers, the authority found in a decision that the companies can still appeal.
Google said it would study the decision and that it had complied with earlier CNIL demands.
The fine against Google is the third issued by the CNIL over the search giant’s use of cookies, after paying 100 million euros in 2020 and 150 million in 2021.
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