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@ 2023/08/10Judge says no
A US judge rejected Google's bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming it invaded the privacy of millions of people by secretly tracking their internet use.
Google had asked US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to throw out the case because it never did anything wrong and besides, users knew what they were getting into when they used the product.
But Judge Gonzalez Rogers was having none of it. She could not find that users consented to let Google collect information about what they viewed online because the Alphabet unit never explicitly told them it would.
David Boies, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the proposed $5 billion class action, called the decision "an important step in protecting the privacy interests of millions of Americans."
The plaintiffs alleged that Google's analytics, cookies and apps let the Mountain View, California-based company track their activity even when they set Google's Chrome browser to "Incognito" mode and other browsers to "private" browsing mode.
They said this let Google learn enough about their friends, hobbies, favourite foods, shopping habits, and "potentially embarrassing things" they seek online, becoming "an unaccountable trove of information so detailed and expansive that George Orwell could never have dreamed it."
A US judge rejected Google's bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming it invaded the privacy of millions of people by secretly tracking their internet use.
Google had asked US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to throw out the case because it never did anything wrong and besides, users knew what they were getting into when they used the product.
But Judge Gonzalez Rogers was having none of it. She could not find that users consented to let Google collect information about what they viewed online because the Alphabet unit never explicitly told them it would.
David Boies, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the proposed $5 billion class action, called the decision "an important step in protecting the privacy interests of millions of Americans."
The plaintiffs alleged that Google's analytics, cookies and apps let the Mountain View, California-based company track their activity even when they set Google's Chrome browser to "Incognito" mode and other browsers to "private" browsing mode.
They said this let Google learn enough about their friends, hobbies, favourite foods, shopping habits, and "potentially embarrassing things" they seek online, becoming "an unaccountable trove of information so detailed and expansive that George Orwell could never have dreamed it."
