US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, postponed a scheduled February 5, 2024 trial on a proposed class action lawsuit on Thursday, as lawyers from Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), along with consumers, announced reaching a tentative settlement.
The plaintiffs demanded at least $5 billion. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but lawyers stated that the company had agreed to a binding list of terms and expected to submit a formal agreement for court approval by February 24, 2024.
The lawsuit alleged that Google’s analytics, cookies and apps allowed the Alphabet unit to track their activity even when they put Google’s Chrome browser in “Incognito” mode and other browsers in “private” browsing mode.
They argued that such actions had turned Google into an “unaccountable trove of information,” allowing the company to discover everything down to the “potentially embarrassing things” they searched for online.
The lawsuit, filed in 2020, covered “millions” of Google users since June 1, 2016, and demanded damages of at least $5,000 per user for violations of federal wiretapping and California privacy laws.
Earlier in August, the California District Judge rejected Google’s bid to dismiss the lawsuit. Gonzalez Rogers stated that the question, whether Google made a legally binding promise not to collect users’ data when they browsed in private mode, remained open.
The judge cited Google’s privacy policy and other statements from the company suggesting it limited the amount of information it could collect.
