Google Ordered to Pay $425.7 Million in Damages For Improper Smartphone Snooping (apnews.com) 42
"A federal jury has ordered Google to pay $425.7 million for improperly snooping on people's smartphones during a nearly decade-long period of intrusions," reports the Associated Press:
The lawyers who filed the case had argued Google had used the data they collected off smartphones without users' permission to help sell ads tailored to users' individual interests — a strategy that resulted in the company reaping billions in additional revenue. The lawyers framed those ad sales as illegal profiteering that merited damages of more than $30 billion. Even though the jury came up with a far lower calculation for the damages, one of the lawyers who brought the case against Google hailed the outcome as a victory for privacy protection. "We hope this result sends a message to the tech industry that Americans will not sit idly by as their information is collected and monetized against their will," said attorney John Yanchunis of law firm Morgan & Morgan.
David Boies, the man who led the U.S. government's 2001 antitrust prosecution of Microsoft, was the plaintiffs' attorney. More details from Bloomberg Law: The lawsuit alleged that since 2016 Google told its users that when they turned off a privacy setting known as Web & App Activity, the company would cease collecting their data from third-party apps that use Google's back end data analytics services. Google continued that collection despite its promise to users that they had control, the plaintiffs alleged. Judge Richard Seeborg certified a class of 98 million Google users who has switched the Web & App Activity setting off...
Boies told the jury during closing statements that the case was about Google breaking its promise to users that they had control over their data. He pointed to Congressional testimony from Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2018 who said users could clearly see what information the company had, all while internal communications and surveys said users were being misled about their privacy... During closing statements, Google attorney Benedict Hur of Cooley LLP said that as soon as a user click the tracking switch off, they were presented with an "Are You Sure?" screen that stated that users can "learn about the data Google continues to collect and why" by clicking an additional link.
A spokesperson for Google said they would appeal the verdict.
David Boies, the man who led the U.S. government's 2001 antitrust prosecution of Microsoft, was the plaintiffs' attorney. More details from Bloomberg Law: The lawsuit alleged that since 2016 Google told its users that when they turned off a privacy setting known as Web & App Activity, the company would cease collecting their data from third-party apps that use Google's back end data analytics services. Google continued that collection despite its promise to users that they had control, the plaintiffs alleged. Judge Richard Seeborg certified a class of 98 million Google users who has switched the Web & App Activity setting off...
Boies told the jury during closing statements that the case was about Google breaking its promise to users that they had control over their data. He pointed to Congressional testimony from Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2018 who said users could clearly see what information the company had, all while internal communications and surveys said users were being misled about their privacy... During closing statements, Google attorney Benedict Hur of Cooley LLP said that as soon as a user click the tracking switch off, they were presented with an "Are You Sure?" screen that stated that users can "learn about the data Google continues to collect and why" by clicking an additional link.
A spokesperson for Google said they would appeal the verdict.
First you gotta get the google's attention! (Score:2)
This story calls for the old joke about raising children:
"Of course I would never beat my children. It's just that sometimes you have to get their attention first."
I wanted to include a link to a good version of the joke, but the google's "All" search replied "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search". The AI mode search was even less helpful. Of course.
I think the only way to get the google's attention about the harms they are doing would be with a much bigger fine than a measly $400 m
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I hate typos. But of course Slashdot lacks the resources to do anything to help...
s/Stars with/Starts with/
And I probably should have specified I was referring to the YouTube app running on Android. Don't recall seeing the same specific scam when YouTube is running in Firefox (on Windows or Linux). Plenty of other scams in YouTube, but this one is fresh and seems especially dangerous, though I can't recall having read about any major botnets running on smartphones. (My ignorance again?)
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I think the only way to get the google's attention about the harms they are doing would be with a much bigger fine than a measly $400 million.
Came to say pretty much this, but also to add that it could at least be the beginning of a useful trend. You know the old saying: "A half-billion here and a half-billion there, and soon you're talking real money".
So have any of you seen the new entry to YouTube? Stars with the pushy ad for the PDF viewer you need to install RIGHT NOW.
You still see ads other than embeds on YouTube? Why?
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I don't think you are suggesting I should pay the blackmail money, so I guess you are advocating for ad-blocking tools. I'm going for funny now, but just because the google has gone all EVIL doesn't mean I should abandon my principles. The deal is supposed to be "Free video for ads" and I'm going to honor the terms of the deal even though the google has become one of the contenders for most evil corporate cancer in a world of corporate cancers, by corporate lawyers, for rich shareholders (who love imaginary
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I look at it this way: there are lots and lots of people who roll over for the brogligarchy without ever even questioning what they're doing. They're the same people who sign on for loyalty programs with retailers so they can get prices that are only lower than the list price that the company determined by factoring in the cost of the loyalty program. So I, who fight to keep my data private and to tell nosy corps to sod off, end up paying more. A similar phenomenon occurs with online services, tracking, and
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And I respect your technical competence--but I think you are losing. As I've said before, "Time >> Money" and I believe your efforts are consuming a significant amount of your time. Even worse, you are fighting against experts (both technical experts and applied psychologists) who don't care about your little "victories". They see your best efforts as akin to a few small coins (temporarily) lost under a couch cushion... They regard you as harmless because your efforts don't scale, and they also know "
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No, my efforts don't cost me that much time, though I suppose they cost a fair amount when I was first setting up the 'defenses'. And I know the privacy-rapers don't care about outliers like me. I'd just rather - for my own satisfaction as well as for a little bit of added protection - that my privacy and attention not be low-hanging fruit. Also, I am now so allergic to seeing YouTube videos interrupted by ads that I experience a visceral reaction. (My wife uses Apple and therefore has no hope of blocking t
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Apology noted, but it's hard to justify continuing the dialog (conversation?), though there are a number of points worth further consideration or clarification. Mostly I think I 'sufficiently' understand where you're at--and you should add the time you spend explaining your position to the running tab.
Mostly I'll just say that you seem to think PAT is a partly benign cancer and that is probably a major area of disagreement. Cancer is always greedy to the point of killing the host. In this case there is an e
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Mostly I'll just say that you seem to think PAT is a partly benign cancer and that is probably a major area of disagreement.
Quite the opposite - I think he and his fellows are perhaps the greatest danger humanity faces. Thiel is a modern-day vampire with no empathy and no conscience, who wants to live forever at any cost. Of all the death notices I might read, his would perhaps satisfy me the most.
Cancer is always greedy to the point of killing the host. In this case there is an entire gang of cancers killing their host society and even the planet they lived on. (And don't forget the original topic/story was the google, which is probably one of the lesser cancers compared to PAT.)
Agreed, one hundred percent. He's happy to kill the planet because he imagines that by the time he's dead he'll already be immortal; either running at least partly on hardware in some bolthole on Earth, or as emperor of some colony on
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I acknowledge your comprehensive response, but I don't want to go so deeply into the weeds. Especially not in a dead discussion in the depths of Slashdot. So I'm focusing on just a couple of minor reactions.
Regarding PAT's fate, I strongly suspect he has clones. No evidence, not even circumstantial, though perhaps some evidence of absence? But not just him. I think a number of the worst actors have probably gone that route for "immortality". And now I wonder how long before the clones are detected.
I agree t
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A parasite wants to feed without being noticed.
Chain these actions together FTW!
They must have made billions doing it (Score:2)
as opposed.. (Score:4, Interesting)
to proper smartphone snooping. ?
Wrong Headline (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be "Court Tells Google to Continue Violations of User Privacy". If they made multiple billions and were fined $0.5b, and none of the executives went to jail, then there is no reason not to keep doing it. The fine needs to exceed the benefit derived from the infraction.
Re:Wrong Headline (Score:4, Insightful)
These are incredibly wealthy, politically connected people. The law doesn't apply to them.
Re:Wrong Headline (Score:5, Insightful)
That $0.5b is just the government's slice of the action.
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Mod parent funny for the saddest values of funny.
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Insightful not funny
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Insightful not funny
Plural not singular.
Insightful and funny frequently go hand in hand; for further examples I suggest mining YouTube for George Carlin routines. Oh, wait... allow me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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That's really not how courts work though. There is a range of measures that can be used to stop people that keep breaking the law. First one is usually to send a message, perp usually won't like the second round in court.
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Google is more powerful than any court, or any government.
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Keep doing it so they can make $$$$$ and be repeatedly fined $
Everyone wins (apart from the suckers).
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It should be "Court Tells Google to Continue Violations of User Privacy". If they made multiple billions and were fined $0.5b, and none of the executives went to jail, then there is no reason not to keep doing it. The fine needs to exceed the benefit derived from the infraction.
Because now, it is just a cost of doing business.
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Are US laws really so half baked that if they keep doing it the fines don't increase? In Europe the cost keeps increasing and can eventually become criminal contempt in many jurisdictions.
Improper? (Score:2)
The title implies that there is such a thing as "Proper" Snooping.
And snooping? That's a nice word isn't it.
I was just snooping around the attic and found an old photo album.
Not
Google snoops through every flicker of light, every footstep, every whisper your phone records, building an album of you that never ends.
Third party apps (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Third party apps (Score:5, Interesting)
Apps are scary, advertising and analytics frameworks doubly so.
Do you know that apps of the same publisher can communicate across their sandboxes on Apple devices? (I think Android uses another permission system)
Do you know, that some apps were caught to write identifiers to files, that are read by other apps that do not have the permission to read these identifiers?
Do you know, that Meta apps opened a TCP port so websites could use the user's browser to communicate with the app (such that Metas scripts in the website and the app could associate the data/account information)?
Most closed source apps do things we would call malware if a PC program would do them.
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Use open source apps as much as possible. F-Droid is a good place to start. Build from source if you are paranoid, and optionally run your own F-Droid repo for automatic updates. For iOS I think you are boned.
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I already do, but there are still quite a few apps one would like to have. There would also be no real reason against closed and paid apps, if they would be clean of such techniques.
The problem is the culture in the stores of the large companies. People put an ad framework in their app because it is easy and if they make a dollar from their app they are happy. The ad framework on the other hand tracks all the users all the time. Users didn't read the fineprint, but the app programmer probably didn't read th
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Most closed source apps do things we would call malware if a PC program would do them
Exactly. Except even many open-source apps also use libraries from providers like Google. At least if it's open-source, then people (in principal) can know what's there. Though in practice that only indirectly and partially protects the vast number of users of open-source software who are not themselves developers. Like me using apps such as Notepad++ - I trust it by reputation, but I don't really know what's in it.
And the majority of users of phone apps are even less likely to be capable of inspecting the
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You probably could slash most creepy tracking by banning personalized ads. Why should anyone buy user tracking data if they are not allowed to profit from it? Maybe one needs to think about a few other applications of user data, but it would be much easier to make a list how the data is (ab)used than making a list of all tracking techniques to ban. Regulation on cookies? You'll see more browser fingerprinting. But regulation on using the data (no matter which tech was used to get it) would be something you
Criminal under the EU's GDPR? (Score:2)
If so we may see some rather more serious consequences. The fines GDPR allows are spectacular... here's hoping that someone will cut and paste the evidence and outcome of this conclusion as the basis for a criminal charge in the EU.
\o/ (Score:1)
This is a nice con:
* 1) Make a law which purports to protect some group
* 2) Fine those who break the law
* 3) Keep the money - literally 'Profit!' from the three-step kata we all love.
At what point do the apparent victims get compensated. Oh wait, would that be never? Because the idea is (as the private sector is so fond of), to use ordinary powerless n00bs as pawns in your game of fuck-everyone-else-over ? ProTip: it would appear: Yes!
What a deal (Score:4)
How many takers would there have been if Google offered a one time $4.25 payment in exchange for tracking you online for 9 years?
How many fewer takers would there have been if $1.50 of that payment went to a lawyer, and you only got $2.75?
This is an laughably insufficient amount of money.
David Boies was also Virginia Giuffre's lawyer (Score:1)
against both Prince Andrew and Epstein's estate.. and the latter case didn't go anywhere, in fact I would say Boies functioned as controlled opposition in the Epstein case.
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i dont mind some mild collection? (Score:1)
DO MOAR EVIL (Score:1)
until someone notices
No joke (Score:2)
And now definitely too late for one to get modded as such.