“This settlement is a historic step in demanding honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies,” David Boies, chairman of the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, which led the lawsuit, said in an email.
“We are pleased to have settled this lawsuit, which we have long believed to be pointless. Plaintiffs originally sought $5 billion, but received zero,” a Google spokesperson said. Jose Castañeda said. “We are happy to delete obsolete technical data that is not associated with an individual or used for any form of personalization.”
The agreement comes after Google settled a lawsuit in December, avoiding a potentially high-profile trial. Google faces a growing number of significant regulatory challenges in the U.S. and abroad as concerns grow about how big tech companies use customer data. Earlier this year, a judge found that Google violated competition laws in the way it operated its Android app store, a major defeat for Google after video game giant Epic Games sued the company.
The company has long fought class action lawsuits and government lawsuits related to its data collection practices, but is increasingly settling lawsuits instead.
