UK court opposes mass lawsuit against Google's alleged follow-up of Safari users

The London High Court on Monday blocked any collective lawsuit lawsuit against Google for attempting to search history of millions of iPhone users in the UK (via Reuters).

The plaintiffs claimed that Google had illegally collected the personal data of more than 4 million iPhone users in the UK between 2011 and 2012 bypassing the default privacy settings of Apple's smartphones. , which allowed him to follow the online behavior of Safari users.

Original explanation of the "workaround" in the 2012 WSJ article

Consumers' rights activist Richard Lloyd, who was leading the 20,000-person lawsuit, said Google's "Safari Workaround" violated UK data protection law by taking personal information without permission, and wanted the tech giant pays several hundred dollars to each affected person.

When the case was first introduced in November 2017, Google said that it was "not new" and promised to defend itself, having already defended similar cases. "We do not think it has merit and we will challenge it," said the tech giant at the time. Monday, the court ruled in favor of Google.

"Today's judgment is extremely disappointing and actually leaves millions of people without any practical means of obtaining compensation and compensation when their personal data has been misused", said Lloyd in a statement.

"Google's business model relies on the use of personal data to target ads on consumers, who must ask for permission before using this data." The court admitted that people did not give permission in this case, but slammed the door for Google to be held responsible. "

A similar case occurred in the United States in 2012, when Google and several other ad agencies circumvented the privacy protections in Safari for iOS to track users through ads in many popular websites.

At the time, Safari blocked several types of tracking, but was an exception for websites where one person interacted in one way or another – by completing a form, for example. Google has added to some of its ads the coding making Safari believe that someone was submitting an invisible form to Google. Safari therefore let Google install a cookie on the user's phone.

Google ended the practice as soon as it was reported by the the Wall Street newspaper, but argued that the follow-up was unintentional and did not harm consumers. However, this was not resolved by the US Federal Trade Commission, which was forced to pay a record $ 22.5 million fine for using this tactic.