Republican states balk at Google privacy settlement in US appeal
By Mike Scarcella
Sept 19 (Reuters) -A group of Republican state attorneys general on Wednesday urged a U.S. appeals court to reject a $62 million consumer privacy settlement with Google GOOGL.O that awards money to the plaintiffs’ lawyers and to advocacy groups, but not to class members.
The 20 state attorneys general, led by Iowa and including Florida, Ohio, Georgia and Virginia, told the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the deal provides more benefits to “controversial political organizations” than to class members.
The states' friend-of-the-court brief backing a challenge to the accord said it was improper to funnel the settlement funds tothird-party groups whose areas of focus include "environmental justice, abortion, and controversial positions on sex and sexuality.” The states said their work was "wholly unrelated to the class’s data privacy claim."
Google in a statement said the organizations selected by the parties in the case "have a strong commitment to promoting online privacy." The company said the states had an opportunity to object earlier to the settlement terms but had not done so.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs, who will receive $18 million in fees from the deal, did not immediately respond to arequest for comment.
In the underlying case, Google was accused of unlawfully tracking and storing location data for 247.7 million U.S. mobile users who had disabled “location history” on their phones. Google denied any wrongdoing in agreeing to settle.
The judge who approved the deal in May found payments to class members would be too small to be practical.
The dispute offers the San Francisco-based appeals court its latest opportunity to examine the propriety of “cy pres only” settlements in which funds are earmarked for independent groups to pursue interests tied to the claims in the case.
The 21 recipients of $42.6 million in settlement funds include the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project; Free Press; and Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. The groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
A group of class members appealed the approval of the settlement to the 9th Circuit. The challengers are led by Theodore Frank, director at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute and the Center for Class Action Fairness.
In a filing last week, Frank criticized what he called the “tremendous size of the cy pres fund with no effort to distribute to the class.”
Iowa and the other states argued that many of the recipients of settlement funds do not have a “substantial nexus” to the class members’ interests.
The states asked the appeals court to at least order the reconsideration of third-party groups that “do not solely advance the social justice aims of the defendants and class counsel.”
The case is Napoleon Patacsil et al v. Google, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 24-3387.
For plaintiffs: Michael Sobol of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein; and Tina Wolfson of Ahdoot & Wolfson
For objectors: Theodore Frank of Center for Class Action Fairness
For states: Eric Wessan of the Iowa Attorney General’s Office
Read more:
Google privacy deal yields $18 mln for lawyers, no funds for consumers
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