Tech giant Google has been ordered to pay over $425 million for improperly snooping on the data of smartphone users and invading users’ privacy from 2016-2024.
It’s a violation of public trust,” said attorney & political analyst Madeline Summerville.
The class action lawsuit, initially filed in 2020, accused the company of collecting data from 98 million devices that had turned off a tracking feature in their Google account.
Even though I’ve shutoff all the different apparatuses that would keep Google from monitoring me, they’re still doing it because they were doing it through third party apps,” Summerville said.
The jury found Google spied on users and was in violation of California privacy laws. But Google denied it was improperly accessing devices. A Google spokesperson told Reuters, this decision misunderstands how its products work and it plans to file an appeal. “Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalization, we honor that choice.”
Hellbound and Down 