A US federal jury on Wednesday ordered Google to pay about $425 million for gathering information from smartphone app use even when people opted for privacy settings, the company confirmed.
“This case is about Google’s illegal interception of consumers’ private activity on consumer mobile applications (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.
The Silicon Valley giant has been striving to replace online activity tracking “cookies” with a mechanism less invasive but equally effective.
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.
France’s data protection authority 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.
Both firms failed to secure users’ free and informed consent before setting advertising cookies on their browsers, the authority found in a decision the companies can still appeal.
Google said it would study the decision and that it has complied with earlier CNIL demands.
Wednesday’s 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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© Agence France-Presse
