“This settlement is a historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies,” David Boies, chairman of law firm Boies Schiller Flexner which led the lawsuit, said in an email.
“We are pleased to settle this lawsuit, which we always believed was meritless. The plaintiffs originally wanted $5 billion and are receiving zero,” said Google spokesman José Castañeda. “We are happy to delete old technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalization.”
The agreement comes after Google settled the lawsuit in December, avoiding a potentially high-profile trial. Google has been facing an increasing number of major legal and regulatory challenges in the United States and abroad as concerns have grown about how big tech companies use their customers’ data. Earlier this year, a judge found Google had broken competition law in how it ran its Android app store after video game giant Epic Games sued the company, a major defeat for Google.
The company, which for years fought class-action and government lawsuits related to its data collection practices, has increasingly begun settling lawsuits instead.
