A US jury ordered Google to pay $425 million for violating the privacy of tens of millions of users who chose not to use a feature-tracking app.
After a group of Google users accused the tech giant of continuing to collect data from third-party apps even after they had changed their account settings to stop it, the jury in San Francisco on Wednesday delivered the verdict.
Google claimed it had an error in understanding how its products operated and that it had filed an appeal.
When users choose to turn off personalization, Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said in a statement that “we honor that choice.”
The plaintiffs claimed in their lawsuit that Google hacked into privacy guidelines set forth in its Web &, App Activity settings, collecting and selling users’ data for mobile app activity.
Around 98 million Google users were covered by the lawsuit, which was filed in July 2020.
Google had argued during the trial that the data was kept in “segregated, secured, and encrypted locations” and not “personal.”
Google  has been the subject of a number of other recent privacy-related lawsuits.
Source: Aljazeera
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