A federal jury determined on Wednesday that Alphabet, the Google parent company, must pay 425 million dollars for invading the privacy of users by continuing to collect data from millions of users who had deactivated a monitoring function in their Google account.
The verdict occurs after a trial in the Federal Court of San Francisco on the accusations that Google, for an eight -year period, agreed to user mobile devices to collect, save and use their data, violating privacy guarantees under the configuration of “web activity and applications” of the company.
Plaintiff users had sought more than 31 billion dollars in damages.
The jury found Google responsible in two of the three accusations of privacy violation raised by the plaintiffs. The jury determined that Google did not act with malice, which means that it has no right to punitive damage.
A Google spokesman confirmed the verdict. The company had denied any irregularity.
The collective demand, presented in July 2020, claimed that Google continued to collect user data even with the configuration deactivated, through their relationship with applications such as Uber, Venmo and Meta Instagram, which use certain Google analysis services.
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During the trial, Google said that the data collected were “non -personal, pseudonyms and stored in segregated, safe and encrypted locations.” Google also argued that the data were not associated with the user Google accounts or with the individual user identity.
The Judge of the US District, Richard Seeborg, certified the case as a collective claim that covers about 98 million Google users and 174 million devices.
Google has faced other privacy demands, including one earlier this year, where it paid almost 1.4 billion dollars in an agreement with Texas for accusations that the company violated the privacy laws of the State.
In April 2024, Google agreed to destroy billions of data records on user private navigation activities to resolve a demand that alleged that the company tracked people who thought they were navigated privately, even in the “incognito” mode.
With Reuters information.
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