Google Jury to Decide Between Broken Privacy Promises or No Harm

Attorneys for Google LLC and a class of users suing the company for privacy violations clashed on the final day of trial, as the users increased their compensatory damages ask to $31 billion, $2 billion more than at the start of the trial over a Google data tracking setting.

The two week trial in San Francisco federal court concluded Tuesday, leaving a jury to decide whether Google purposely mislead users into believing the company wouldn’t continue collecting their data after turning off a privacy switch called Web & App Activity.

The suit filed in 2020 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California alleged that Google deceived users into believing that turning off the Web & App Activity setting would prevent data tracking across third-party apps that use Google’s back-end data analytics services. The class is composed of 98 million users who turned off the setting.

The plaintiffs’ attorney David Boies of Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP said the case boils down to Google’s broken promise to users that they had control over their personal data.

He pointed to 2018 congressional testimony from Google CEO Sundar Pichai who said users can clearly see what kinds of data the company had and could toggle on and off that data collection. But internal Google emails and surveys uncovered during the litigation showed that users were being misled about how much control they actually had, Boies said.

Google promised “control over what was collected, control over what was saved, control to delete the data that was collected,” Boies told the jury. “None of that was true. People were given a purported choice but no control.”

The attorney said the $31 billion was calculated by the value of data coming from each device at $3 per month covering 174 million devices owned by the class. Class members has the Web & App Activity setting turned off for an average of 59.5 months, Boies said, more than the 56 months he estimated at the start of the trial.

Google’s attorney Benedict Hur of Cooley LLP told jurors that the search giant has always made clear to users that toggling off the privacy switch wouldn’t completely stop data collection, but would instead continue to collect anonymized, aggregate data for third-party apps that use Google services.

He told the jury that when a user switches Web & App Activity off, Google immediately discloses to the user that they can “learn about the data Google continues to collect and why” by clicking an additional link.

Hur also said there wasn’t any real harm caused by Google. He said that the plaintiffs’ claims that the privacy violations caused mental harm or felt like a naked photo being leaked aren’t true.

“First it’s a fake button, then it’s a naked picture, then it’s psychological harm,” Hur said. “These are desperate attempts to manufacturer some kind of harm in this case, there is no evidence of that here.”

Susman Godfrey LLP and Morgan & Morgan also represent the plaintiffs.

The case is Rodriguez v. Google LLC, N.D. Cal., No. 3:20-cv-04688, 9/2/25.