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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA panel of federal judges said Tuesday that Google must face a lawsuit seeking class action status that alleged the tech giant misled some users of its Chrome browser into thinking it wasn’t collecting data on their activity, the latest in a string of legal defeats for the company in recent months.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco struck down a 2022 federal district court ruling that threw out the lawsuit, saying the lower court didn’t take into account whether “reasonable” people would have understood their data was being collected by Google’s Chrome browser when they chose not to activate a feature that syncs a person’s Chrome activity with their Google account. The appeals court sent the case back to the district level for trial.
The ruling adds to the significant legal defeats that Google has been dealt in the past year. In December, a jury in San Francisco found Google broke competition laws in how it ran its app store for Android devices. Earlier this month, a federal judge said the company’s search engine business was an illegal monopoly.
Google has appealed both decisions, but judges in both cases are preparing to rule on how the company should be forced to change its practices. Those measures could take effect even if appeals go forward. Last week, the federal judge in Google’s app store case indicated in a hearing that he would “tear the barriers down” in deciding how to force the company to give up its unfair control of Android app downloads and digital purchases.
Over the past several years, the U.S. government has launched major legal challenges against Google and other Big Tech companies, including Amazon, Meta and Apple. Skeptics of the government’s approach said the companies could swat away the challenges with their armies of lawyers and by relying on federal judges to use more traditional interpretations of antitrust law. But Google’s losses have energized Big Tech critics, who say the legal system is catching up with the ballooning power of giant internet companies.
In the case that the appeals court ruled in on Tuesday, users of the Chrome browser alleged that Google acted deceptively by collecting data on their internet activity even though they had explicitly decided not to sync their Chrome activity with the Google account they used with other Google products.
The panel of three judges said there was a discrepancy between the way Google marketed the privacy of its Chrome browser with the reality that it collected some data.
José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said that the company disagreed with the ruling and that it was “confident the facts of the case are on our side. Chrome Sync helps people use Chrome seamlessly across their different devices and has clear privacy controls.”
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