US appeals court revives Google privacy class action
By Jonathan Stempel
Aug 20 (Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court said Google GOOGL.O must face a revived lawsuit by Google Chrome users who said the company collected their personal information without permission, after they chose not to synchronize their browsers with their Google accounts.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the lower court judge who dismissed the proposed class action should have assessed whether reasonable Chrome users consented to letting Google collect their data when they browsed online.
Tuesday's 3-0 decision followed Google's agreement last year to destroy billions of records to settle a lawsuit claiming the Alphabet unit tracked people who thought they were browsing privately, including in Chrome's "Incognito" mode.
Neither Google nor its lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment.
Matthew Wessler, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he was pleased with the decision and looked forward to a trial.
The proposed class covers Chrome users since July 27, 2016 who did not sync their browsers with their Google accounts.
They said Google should have honored Chrome's privacy notice, which said users "don't need to provide any personal information to use Chrome" and Google would not receive such information unless they turned on the "sync" function.
The lower court judge concluded that Google's general privacy policy allowing data collection governed, because the Mountain View, California-based company would have collected the plaintiffs' information regardless of which browsers they used.
In Tuesday's decision, Circuit Judge Milan Smith called that focus misplaced.
"Here, Google had a general privacy disclosure yet promoted Chrome by suggesting that certain information would not be sent to Google unless a user turned on sync," Smith wrote. "A reasonable user would not necessarily understand that they were consenting to the data collection at issue."
The appeals court returned the case to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, who had dismissed it in December 2022.
Google's settlement related to Incognito let users sue the company individually for damages. Tens of thousands of users in California alone have since done so in that state's courts.
The case is Calhoun et al v Google LLC, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 22-16993.
Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by David Gregorio
免責聲明: XM Group提供線上交易平台的登入和執行服務,允許個人查看和/或使用網站所提供的內容,但不進行任何更改或擴展其服務和訪問權限,並受以下條款與條例約束:(i)條款與條例;(ii)風險提示;(iii)完全免責聲明。網站內部所提供的所有資訊,僅限於一般資訊用途。請注意,我們所有的線上交易平台內容並不構成,也不被視為進入金融市場交易的邀約或邀請 。金融市場交易會對您的投資帶來重大風險。
所有缐上交易平台所發佈的資料,僅適用於教育/資訊類用途,不包含也不應被視爲適用於金融、投資稅或交易相關諮詢和建議,或是交易價格紀錄,或是任何金融商品或非應邀途徑的金融相關優惠的交易邀約或邀請。
本網站的所有XM和第三方所提供的内容,包括意見、新聞、研究、分析、價格其他資訊和第三方網站鏈接,皆爲‘按原狀’,並作爲一般市場評論所提供,而非投資建議。請理解和接受,所有被歸類為投資研究範圍的相關内容,並非爲了促進投資研究獨立性,而根據法律要求所編寫,而是被視爲符合營銷傳播相關法律與法規所編寫的内容。請確保您已詳讀並完全理解我們的非獨立投資研究提示和風險提示資訊,相關詳情請點擊 這裡查看。