A San Francisco federal judge has refused to undo a jury’s decision to make Google pay nearly $426 million for violating the privacy rights of as many as 100 million Google users by allegedly tracking their data after the users thought they had disabled tracking.
But the judge said he also wouldn’t go along with plaintiffs’ new demands to boost the payout to nearly $2.4 billion, either.
On Jan. 30, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg denied posttrial motions filed by both sides in the weeks that have followed the jury’s award.
The San Francisco jury had rendered its verdict in September 2025, following a trial presided over by Seeborg in federal district court.
The lawsuit had proceeded to trial nearly five years after attorneys from the firm of Boies Schiller Flexner, of San Francisco, Miami and Washington, D.C., had lodged their lawsuit.
In the action, the plaintiffs had asserted Google should be made to pay for allegedly violating at least tens of millions of Google users’ privacy rights afforded under federal and California law.
Specifically, the lawsuit accused Google of allegedly misleading users into believing they could prevent Google from collecting and tracking their data by toggling off a “switch” in their account settings. However, the lawsuit asserted Google still would collect certain “anonymized data when Plaintiffs accessed third-party apps “and used that information to support its commercial activities.
Google failed to dismiss the lawsuit in its entirety, and the case ultimately went to trial concerning the plaintiffs’ claims that Google’s alleged conduct violated privacy rights set by California law and under the California state constitution.
At trial, the plaintiffs’ lawyers told jurors the company should be made to pay $31 billion, which is the sum the attorneys estimated the company had earned in profits from its use of the information.
Jurors, however, placed the harm significantly lower, ordering the company to pay more than $425 million for allegedly violating the California state constitution’s privacy rights guarantees.
While plaintiffs’ lawyers said publicly they were “very pleased” with the verdict, they still attempted to persuade Judge Seeborg to override the jury and order the company to instead pay $2.36 billion – more than 5 times the amount the jury had ordered – through so-called “disgorgement” of alleged improper profits.
They also asked the judge to permanently block Google from collecting the data at the heart of the case altogether.
For its part, Google filed a competing motion for summary judgment, seeking to decertify the plaintiffs’ class and upend the verdict in the process. Google argued testimony presented at trial showed the collection of the data wasn’t “highly offensive” enough to allow the case to continue as a class action.
Seeborg, however, rejected all of the requests from both parties.
In rejecting Google’s motion, the judge said Google’s request was based on an overbroad take on testimony from lead plaintiff Anibal Rodriguez. The judge said Google’s “misapprehension” resulted from a misunderstanding of the plaintiffs’ contention, and the jury’s finding, that “Google’s decision to collect certain data after it said it would not was inherently offensive.”
And the judge further denied the plaintiffs’ gambit for a much larger payday and a court order barring data collection.
He said the case wasn’t really about the collection of the data, but rather about Google’s alleged deception. The judge noted Google has since updated its notice to users to indicate the company still may track and use certain user data. And the judge said he believed that notice was sufficient.
As to the demand for billions of dollars more in “disgorgement,” Seeborg agreed such a remedy could be possible in the case. But he said plaintiffs have yet to present evidence to support their contention that $426 million isn’t enough in this case.
While the plaintiffs’ lawyers repeatedly told the jury that Google should pay $31 billion, “the jury simply did not buy it.”
Likewise, the judge said the $2.36 billion demand also didn’t hold up to the evidence in the case and disputes over the amount Google had allegedly gained produced only “ambiguity.”
