Google headquarters
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA - A Santa Clara County jury says Google must pay more than $314 million to a group of millions of California Android smartphone users, after the jury found Google had allegedly secretly used data from their devices to send them targeted ads.
The verdict, rendered July 1 by the jury of eight women and four men, brought to a close a trial that began June 2 in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
The trial marked the latest step in a class action lawsuit that began in 2019, when attorneys from the firms of Korein Tillery, of St. Louis, and Bartlit Beck, of Denver, filed suit on behalf of potentially millions of California Android smartphone users.
The plaintiffs' class is led by named plaintiffs Attila Csupo, Andrew Burke and Kerry Hecht, all of whom were identified as California residents who owned and used Android smartphones on various mobile communications platforms, including AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon.
The telecommunications companies were not named as defendants in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit asserted Google, which provides the operating system used by Android smartphones, had programmed the Android operating system and the apps which function within that system, to "passively" share with Google information from customers' devices.
According to the lawsuit, Google then used the customer information to create and tailor advertising to those Android customers based on browsing history, app usage and other collected data.
According to the lawsuit, the alleged "information transfers" occurred "at all hours of the day," and allegedly without consent, allegedly improperly converting customers' purchased cellular data to help Google profit from ads.
"Google deliberately designed and coded its Android operating system and Google applications to indiscriminately take advantage 0f Plaintiffs’ data allowances and passively transfer information at all hours of the day - even after Plaintiffs move Google apps to the background or close the programs completely," the plaintiffs claimed in their 2022 complaint.
Further, the lawsuit asserted Google designed its systems to deny Android users the opportunity to turn off the data sharing or at least restrict them to when customers' devices were using Wi-Fi networks to interact, rather than cellular data.
The Santa Clara County lawsuit was filed on behalf of 14 million California Android customers. However, at the same time, those same plaintiffs' lawyers are also pressing a claim in federal court in San Jose, seeking a likely even bigger payday on behalf of many millions of other Android users throughout the rest of the U.S.
That federal lawsuit, which was filed in 2020, remains pending in the Northern District of California.
To this point, Google has opted to fight the lawsuits, rather than settle.
Google, for instance, asserted the claims could not hold up in court because the company said California law does not recognize such data as belonging to the customer.
That argument, however, ultimately lost, when the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in February 2024 in the federal case that such data can be considered protected "property" and Google could be sued for allegedly "stealing" the data by "converting" it to its own use, without consent or compensation.
Google has also asserted the plaintiffs' alleged conversion claims rest on a mischaracterization of Google business practices and policies, which the company said are needed to ensure the devices work properly.
Google has also argued customers actually consented to the data collection and the data transfers didn't cost the customers anything.
The jury, however, did not agree.
While plaintiffs said they believed Google should pay $800 million, jurors awarded them about $314 million.
Plaintiffs' attorneys celebrated the verdict.
In a July 2 release, plaintiffs' lawyer Marc Wallenstein, of Korein Tillery, said: "It is undeniably clear that the jury agreed with us that Google had been covertly collecting an enormous amount of Android user data, then converting it for their own profit. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Google collected and converted this data through depleting the user's own data."
Google has pledged to appeal. In a published statement, Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said: "We strongly disagree with today's decision. This ruling is a setback for users, as it misunderstands services that are critical to the security, performance and reliability of Android devices."
Google has been represented in the case by attorneys Whitty Somvichian and Michael Attansio, of Cooley LLP, of San Francisco.
Plaintiffs have been represented by attorneys Chad Bell, George Zelcs, Carol O'Keefe, Ryan Cortazar, Pamela Yaacoub and Devin Dippold, of Korein Tillery; and Karma Giulianelli, Glen Summers, Hamilton Hill, Benjamin Montague and Jacob Marsh, of Bartlit Beck.
