On Friday local time, Google persuaded a federal judge in San Francisco to dismiss consumers' demands for over $2 billion in penalties related to the company's past data collection practices after users had disabled core privacy settings.
Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seborg rejected the request, which sought a court order for Google to disgorge an alleged $2.36 billion in illegally obtained profits and to halt certain of its advertising-related data processing activities.
This follows a jury verdict in September that found Google legally liable for secretly collecting application activity data from millions of users after they had turned off tracking features. Google had strongly urged Judge Seborg not to impose the aforementioned penalties on top of this jury verdict.
The September jury verdict ordered Google to pay approximately $425 million in damages to the class action plaintiffs, a figure far lower than the $31 billion sought by the plaintiffs; concurrently, the jury issued an advisory opinion stating there was no justification for ordering Google to disgorge its ill-gotten gains.
Google has not yet responded to requests for comment, and the plaintiffs' lead attorney also has not responded.
Google has consistently denied any wrongdoing and stated it will appeal the September verdict. However, Judge Seborg on Friday denied a separate request from Google—a motion asking the court to decertify the class of plaintiffs, which consists of 98 million users and 174 million devices.
In their application demanding disgorgement of profits, the plaintiffs argued they were entitled to the improper benefits Google allegedly obtained through data tracking. The plaintiffs also stated that, despite the existing verdict, Google had still not amended its privacy statements or data collection operations.
Google countered by arguing that if the court were to issue an injunction prohibiting it from collecting users' account-related data, it would effectively "cripple" an analytics service relied upon by millions of application developers.
Judge Seborg ruled that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that Google's related actions would cause any "future, irreparable harm," thus providing no justification for imposing a permanent injunction on Google's data collection. The judge also noted that the plaintiffs lacked the legal standing to demand disgorgement of profits and that their estimation of Google's related profits was "insufficiently supported."
The case is Rodriguez v. Google LLC, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, case number 3:20-cv-04688.
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