The award request, put forth in opening arguments for the class action trial that began Tuesday in San Francisco, would dwarf payouts in other major privacy cases against Google, including the Texas attorney general’s $1.4 billion settlement earlier this year with the company over state privacy violations.
The extraordinary compensatory damages total is based on the number of users in the class as well as the length of time of the alleged violations.
The class is composed of almost 100 million Google users. The group claims Google illegally collected their data over an eight year period after they turned off tracking in their account settings, class attorney David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP told the eight-person jury during opening statements Tuesday.
The class action filed in 2020 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California alleges Google deceived users into believing that when they turned off a setting known as Web & App Activity, the company would no longer track their personal data across third party phone apps that use Google’s back-end analytics service.
“When you turned it off, it didn’t turn off the collection,” Boies said. “It wasn’t really a choice, it wasn’t really Google giving over control.”
The jury will determine whether Google violated the California Constitution’s right to privacy and the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act before determining a damages award. Judge Richard Seeborg ruled earlier this month that the question of punitive damages will be determined later.
Boies said the trial will reveal evidence that Google knew its Web & App Activity setting was misleading consumers and he pointed to internal emails from senior software engineers who said Google’s statements about the setting were giving users a “false sense of security” about whether their data was being collected.
The plaintiffs’ experts have calculated the value of data coming from each device at $3 per month times 174 million devices owned by 98 million class users, Boies said. The plaintiffs will show evidence that users had turned off the data tracking setting for an average of 56 months between 2016 and 2024.
‘No Evidence of Harm’
Google’s attorney Benedict Hur of Cooley LLP said in his opening statement that no expert in the case has actually calculated a multi-billion dollar award, and that much of the $29 billion was an estimation by the attorneys.
“There was no data leak in this case, there was no data breach, there was no information that was provided to a third party who” used it maliciously, Hur said. “There is simply going to be no evidence of harm at all.”
Google said that when an account’s Web & App Activity setting is on, personal account data is connected with a user’s third party app data, Hur said.
When it’s off, Google continues to track that app data for its product called Firebase that provides aggregate statistics to an app developer, such as how many users click on a certain button in the app. That data isn’t connected back to the user’s personal account, he said.
“You can quibble with the words that Google uses” in its description of the privacy toggle, Hur said. But it makes no sense to believe that turning off Web & App Activity would stop collecting any kind of data at all, he said.
The class action is the only one of a trio of high profile California privacy cases against Google to reach a jury trial.
The company last year settled a class action over privacy problems with Chrome’s “Incognito” browser mode, agreeing to delete billions of data records that reflect users’ browsing history and change internal policies. The agreement resulted in no money awards for class members.
Google still faces another case in the same court over claims that it illegally tracks users even when they don’t “sync” their Google account with Chrome, but a judge this year declined to certify the case as a class action.
The trial against Google, which is expected to last three weeks, comes on the heels of a major privacy jury verdict against
Susman Godfrey LLP and Morgan & Morgan also represent the class.
The case is Rodriguez v. Google LLC, N.D. Cal., No. 3:20-cv-04688, 8/19/25.
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