Google Privacy Changes Lead to Class Action Lawsuits

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Google has been hit with two federal class action lawsuits claiming the company’s new privacy policy violates it’s earlier policies that promised that information provided by a user for one service would not be used by another service without the consumer’s consent.

Both Google class action lawsuits, filed in New York and California, are brought on behalf of a nationwide class of Google account holders and Android owners from August 19, 2004 to February 29, 2012 who continued to maintain their Google accounts and own their Android devices after the new privacy policy came into effect on March 1, 2012.

Google is charged in both class action lawsuits of violating the Federal Wiretap Act for willfully intercepting communications and gathering personal information of its consumers for financial benefit, and for violating the Stored Electronic Communications Act for exceeding its authorized access to consumer communications stored on its systems. Google is further charged with violating the Computer Fraud Abuse Act and several state laws.

Google’s new privacy policy treats a person as a single user across all Google products, and information provided from one service may be combined with information from other services. For example, Google is now allowed to take information from a consumer’s Gmail or Google+ account, which may have one expectation of privacy, and use it in a different context such as to personalize Google search results and advertisements.

Google says the new policy allows the company to target ads and search results more precisely and that the company isn’t collecting any additional data or sharing information with outsiders. Google says the new policy is simpler for consumers and will benefit them by enabling greater personalization

The class action lawsuits say Google has not only combined the information across products, but has also not provided consumers with an easy and efficient way to opt out.

“Consumers must manage their privacy settings for each Google product they use; a universal opt-out function is not available,” the California complaint says.

Both Google privacy class action lawsuits are asking for actual, compensatory and treble damages for the proposed class.

UPDATE: The Google privacy class action lawsuits were consolidated into multidistrict litigation, but the case has been dismissed twice due to insufficient standing. Plaintiffs filed a third amended class action lawsuit addressing the judge’s concerns in January 2014. Google motioned to dismiss the case for good on Feb. 21, 2014.

UPDATE 2 : On May 12, 2015, plaintiffs filed a motion seeking certification of the Google privacy class action lawsuit. A hearing has been scheduled for June 9, 2015.