A federal jury determined on Wednesday that Alphabet’s Google must pay $425 million in a class action lawsuit that accused it of continuing to collect data for millions of users who had switched off a tracking feature in their Google account, a spokesperson for the plaintiffs’ lawyer said.
The verdict comes after a trial in the federal court in San Francisco over allegations that Google over an eight-year period accessed users’ mobile devices to collect, save, and use their data, violating privacy representations under its Web & App Activity setting . The consumers had been seeking more than $31 billion in damages.
The class action, filed in July 2020, claimed that Google continued to collect users’ data even with the setting turned off through its relationship with apps such as Uber, Venmo and Meta’s Instagram that use certain Google analytics services.
A spokesperson for Google confirmed the verdict.
