Google Hit With $425 Million Jury Verdict in Privacy Trial (5)

Google LLC must pay $425.7 million in compensatory damages for violating the privacy rights of almost 100 million Google users who asked that their account data not be tracked, a jury decided Wednesday.

The eight-person jury in San Francisco federal court found that Google deceived its users about a privacy switch in their account settings that would purportedly stop the company from collecting their data across third-party apps. Even if a user flipped the privacy switch, Google continued to save and copy their data in violation of California privacy law, the jury determined.

The jury found that Google is liable for invasion of privacy and intrusion upon seclusion violations under the California Constitution but not California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.

The damages awarded by the jury is vastly inferior to the $31 billion the plaintiffs requested at the end of the trial, but still among the larger privacy payouts from a Big Tech company.

Plaintiffs’ attorney David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP in a statement said: “We are obviously very pleased with today’s verdict.”

“This decision misunderstands how our products work, and we will appeal it,” Google Spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement. “Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalization, we honor that choice.”

The verdict caps off a five-year-old privacy class action against Google in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. It also comes the day after a federal judge in Washington, DC, declined to break up the company by forcing the sale of its Chrome browser in the Department of Justice’s landmark antitrust case.

The lawsuit alleged that since 2016 Google told its users that when they turned off a privacy setting known as Web & App Activity, the company would cease collecting their data from third-party apps that use Google’s back end data analytics services. Google continued that collection despite its promise to users that they had control, the plaintiffs alleged.

Judge Richard Seeborg certified a class of 98 million Google users who has switched the Web & App Activity setting off. Divided evenly among the class, the payout would amount to about $4 per class member.

Boies told the jury during closing statements that the case was about Google breaking its promise to users that they had control over their data. He pointed to Congressional testimony from Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2018 who said users could clearly see what information the company had, all while internal communications and surveys said users were being misled about their privacy.

Jury foreperson Michael Bowman told attorneys after the verdict was announced that the jury believed Google’s “consent language should be a little more obvious” to users.

“The average user is probably not a reader, the average user is probably a skimmer,” he said. “We tried to put ourselves in the shoes of an average user.”

Google argued throughout the trial that it had clearly told users that turning off the Web & App Activity switch meant that their data would be anonymized but would still be tracked to provide aggregate statistics to third-party apps.

During closing statements, Google attorney Benedict Hur of Cooley LLP said that as soon as a user click the tracking switch off, they were presented with an “Are You Sure?” screen that stated that users can “learn about the data Google continues to collect and why” by clicking an additional link.

“There was no breach, no leak, no misuse or data, no sharing of data, no selling of data,” Hur told the jury. “Are you kidding me? There is no highly offensive conduct here.”

The verdict against Google comes on the heels of a major privacy jury verdict against Meta Platforms Inc. in the same courthouse. A jury in August found that Meta violated a different California privacy law when it collected data on users of the popular period tracking app Flo without their consent.

Google has faced a trio of privacy class actions in the Northern District of California involving how they disclose their privacy practices to users.

The company settled a class action last year involving problems with the Chrome browser’s “Incognito” mode. Google faces another privacy case over claims that it illegally tracks users even when they don’t “sync” their Google account with Chrome, but a judge this year declined to certify the case as a class action.

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

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