A US federal court has ordered Google to pay $425 million (£316m) after finding the tech giant breached user privacy by collecting data from millions of people who had turned off a key tracking feature.
The class-action lawsuit, covering about 98 million users and 174 million devices, alleged that Google continued to gather data through its Web & App Activity setting, despite assurances that turning it off would stop tracking. Plaintiffs initially sought more than $31 billion in damages.
The jury held Google liable on two of three claims but ruled the company had not acted with malice.
In a statement to the BBC, a Google spokesperson said: “This 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.”
The case, filed in 2020, claimed Google’s data collection extended across hundreds of thousands of apps, including Uber, Lyft, Amazon, Alibaba, Instagram, and Facebook. Google maintains that while analytics may still collect usage data when tracking is disabled, this does not identify individuals.
The ruling comes in the same week Google’s parent company, Alphabet, saw its shares surge more than 9% after a separate court decision spared it from having to sell its Chrome browser. However, Google must now share search data with rivals and avoid exclusive contracts under antitrust remedies set by District Judge Amit Mehta.
The tech giant also faces another competition case over its dominance in advertising technology, with a trial scheduled later this month.
