UK High Court Blocks Billion-Dollar Privacy Lawsuit Against Google (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The High Court has blocked a bid to sue Google for allegedly unlawfully taking data from 4.4 million UK iPhone users. The legal case was mounted by a group called Google You Owe Us, led by former Which director Richard Lloyd. It sought compensation for people whose handsets were tracked by Google for several months in 2011 and 2012. Mr Lloyd said he was "disappointed" by the ruling and his group would appeal, but Google said it was "pleased" and thought the case was "without merit."

Mr Justice Warby who oversaw the case explained that it was blocked because the claims that people suffered damage were not supported by the facts advanced by the campaign group. Another reason for blocking it, he said, was the impossibility of reliably calculating the number of iPhone users affected by the alleged privacy breach. The complaint made by Google You Owe Us alleged that the cookies were used by Google to track people and get around settings on Apple's Safari browser that blocked such monitoring. Ads were sold on the basis of the personal information gathered by Google's cookies. The Safari workaround was used by Google on lots of different devices but the UK case centered on iPhone users. The group hoped to win $1.3 billion in compensation for affected users.

Comments

Billion POUND lawsuit, please.

[whoever57]

That's £ibn to you.

Dollars and pounds may be changeable, but they are not directly interchangeable.

Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

...SO you can get away with flagrantly breaking the law so long as your victims can't show harm.

Very good to know.

Re:Billion dollars?

[AHuxley]

Its still the users computer and they had settings to stop that tracking.
Should an ad company get to work its way in to a users computer?

So?

[hcs_$reboot]

This is called the legal system, where laws are to be observed. I don't like Google taking/using private data, but otoh, if the "Group" couldn't make their stance clear in court and win, that's not the court fault. Hope they get better prepared for the appeal.

Re:So?

[AmiMoJo]

In this case the law is unsatisfactory. Consider the points on which the claim was rejected.

The accusers failed to demonstrate harm. I don't know the arguments used, but it is likely difficult to prove the tracking caused any kind of harm. Since there are no punitive damages in UK law, they can only claim for actual losses and thus it's very hard to prevent companies doing this kind of thing.

Secondly the judge said it was impossible to calculate the number of affected users. Again, this is because UK law doesn't seek to punish, only to put things right, so you can't just point to the fact that Google is very popular and that it's certain a large number of people were affected.

I don't think it's a good thing that people can get away with this stuff by creating enough uncertainty to make legal challenge impossible. Clearly something wrong was done here, Google aren't even denying it, yet there is no recourse.

Intangible Damages

[tomxor]

because the claims that people suffered damage were not supported by the facts advanced by the campaign group

Well of course... damage caused by violating certain human rights such as privacy tend to be intangible and not even possible to directly draw causal relationships between, just because you can't easily quantify it in monetary terms doesn't make it invalid or worthless.