Google escapes billion-dollar privacy lawsuit in the UK
The UK’s High Court of Justice has blocked an attempt by a campaign group to sue Google for allegedly tracking millions of users without their consent, reports BBC News. The group, “Google, You Owe Us,” claims that as many as 5.4 million users were affected by Google’s tracking between August 2011 and February 2012, and sought around £1 billion ($1.3 billion) in damages from the search giant.
Google has already gotten into trouble as the result of the so-called “Safari Workaround,” which ignored user’s cookie settings within the Safari browser to track them regardless. Back in 2012, the company paid a $22.5 million fine to the FTC for “[misrepresenting] to Safari browser users how to avoid targeted advertising by Google.” At the time,...