Judge blocks consumer effort to claim $2.36B in penalties from Google

A U.S. District Judge denied the plaintiffs’ request to draw $2.6 billion in penalties from Google on Friday. The plaintiffs allege that the tech giant collected their data and used it for profit despite them having switched off a key privacy setting.

Google has managed to convince a federal Judge in San Francisco to deny the plaintiffs’ compensation for the tech giant’s alleged advertisement malpractice. Consumers are suing Google for collecting data from their devices and using it to serve personalized ads, despite consumers having switched on a key privacy setting that legally prohibited Google from doing so.

U.S. District Judge dismisses plaintiffs’ $2.36B claim against Google

Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg denied the plaintiffs’ request to recover $2.36 billion in alleged profits and to halt certain ad-related practices. The accusers sought a permanent injunction against Google, a claim Seeborg vehemently denied during the proceedings. A jury had found the tech conglomerate guilty of invasion of privacy back in September for secretly collecting app activity data from millions of users who had disabled a tracking feature. 

Google pleaded with the judge on Friday not to add the penalty to the September verdict, which ordered the tech giant to pay about $425 million in damages to the plaintiffs who had filed the class-action lawsuit. The settlement is far below the $31 billion the plaintiffs sought in damages and other compensation. 

Court documents reveal that the plaintiffs returned to court, arguing that the compensation was insufficient. The plaintiffs said that the $2.36 billion is still a conservative estimate of the profits Google realized from the tracking feature at the time of the misconduct.

The accusers said they were entitled to Google’s allegedly ill-gotten profits from its data tracking and privacy invasion techniques. Consumers also said Google has not changed its privacy disclosures or data collection practices, despite the September verdict finding the company guilty. Google has pushed back instead, saying it will appeal the September verdict. The tech company also noted that prohibiting it from collecting users’ account-related data would negatively impact an analytics service that developers depend on.

Judge Richard Seeborg said that the victims failed to establish prospective irreparable harm, making a permanent injunction inappropriate for the case. The judge also said that the plaintiffs “failed to show entitlement to disgorgement, both because their legal remedy is adequate and because their estimate of Google’s profits is insufficiently supported.”

Google faces increased class-action lawsuits over the invasion of consumer privacy for profit

The news comes amid a rise in lawsuits against Google. On January 28, Cryptopolitan reported that the tech company agreed to settle a lawsuit for $135 million to avoid a formal trial after Android users claimed the tech company used their cellular data without their consent. According to the report, the plaintiffs argued that Google programmed its mobile operating system to collect and transmit data even when phones were idle or settings were turned off.

Another report noted that the global search company agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit involving its Google voice assistant AI agent. The report dated January 26 highlighted that the company broke the law by recording and sharing their private conversations using Google Assistant. Plaintiffs argued that the AI assistant secretly recorded conversations and that Google then served them personalized ads despite the recordings being illegal and non-consensual.

Google denied the allegations but agreed to settle the matter out of court to avoid legal costs. The report noted that the settlement will cover anyone who owned Google devices or experienced these false activities going back to May 18, 2016. In 2025 alone, Google settled various privacy-related lawsuits totaling more than $2.8 billion.

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