Google Settles Consumer Privacy Lawsuit with $5B Payout

Google LLC has reached a preliminary settlement for its consumer privacy lawsuit. The tech giant owned by Alphabet Inc. agreed to settle and expected to shell out at least $5 billion for the case.

Trial Date for Formal Settlement Has Been Set

The lawsuit is related to the lawsuit that alleged Google has secretly tracked the internet use of millions of users who have always believed they were browsing the web privately. On Thursday, Dec. 28, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, in Oakland, California, scheduled the trial on the proposed class action suit against the company on Feb. 5, 2024.

The judge set the date after the respective lawyers of Google and the consumers revealed they were able to settle. As per Reuters, the plaintiffs are seeking at least $5 billion, but the legal representatives of both sides did not disclose the exact agreed terms of the settlement.

The Allegations Against Google

Then again, while Google and the lawyers declined to comment on the settlement, Forbes reported that the central point of the lawsuit is to put the tech firm's transparency under scrutiny. This is because the case is based on the premise that Google's analytics and ad-targeting mechanisms continued to extract and collect personal data even if the user privacy settings were set to private.

Meanwhile, the case was initially filed in 2020, covering millions of Google users since June 1, 2016. Each user has been seeking at least $5,000 in damages for their claims of violations of federal wire-tapping laws and the California privacy laws. The lawsuit is being tried under the name Brown et al. v Google LLC et al., U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, with case file No. 20-03664.

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