Judge Gives Green Light to Child Privacy Lawsuit Against Google

The Google logo in Las Vegas on Jan.10, 2024. (Steve Marcus/Reuters)

A proposed class action lawsuit accusing Alphabet Inc.’s Google of violating multiple laws—including those aimed at protecting children online—can move forward, a California federal judge ruled on June 18.

U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts for the US District Court for the Northern District of California denied the tech giant’s efforts to dismiss the claims made by parents who allege their children’s data was collected without their permission.

Their claims, including violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law (UCL); California’s constitutional right to privacy; Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (FDUTPA), New York’s General Business Law, and unjust enrichment, among others, are not preempted by the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the judge ruled.

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed in June 2023 by parents of six minors under the age of 13 living in California, Florida, and New York.

It alleges Google’s mobile advertising subsidiary, AdMob, which shows ads in apps, unlawfully invaded the children’s privacy by collecting their personal information through various mobile apps without parental consent.

“Plaintiffs’ complaint here, when construed liberally, pleads facts demonstrating a potential factual dispute by sufficiently alleging that defendants’ purportedly unlawful conduct continued within the relevant statute-of-limitations period,” Judge Pitts wrote in his ruling.

In their complaint, plaintiffs pointed to Google’s Designed for Families (DFF) program for children, which was developed in April 2015 and purportedly imposed requirements set by COPPA to protect children under the age of 13 from having their personal information collected without parental consent.

Surreptitious Tracking, Data Collection

The program effectively categorized thousands of apps for kids on the Google Play store as being either for a “mixed audience,” or “not primarily intended for children,” with the latter indicating that developers were able to “skirt COPPA’s prohibitions on collecting data from minors under the age of 13,” according to the lawsuit.

However, plaintiffs pointed to a 2018 study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that found “surreptitious tracking and data collection in violation of COPPA by developers of apps included in Google’s DFF program.”

Specifically, the researchers found that 2,667 apps were potentially incorrectly listed, allowing their data to be collected and used for targeted advertisements.

Google has attempted to have the proposed lawsuit dismissed in court, arguing that it was filed past the statutes of limitations, lacked standing, and that plaintiffs had failed to establish an economic injury.

The tech giant further argued that one of the developers cited in the lawsuit, Tiny Lab Productions, was banned from Google’s Play Store more than four years before the lawsuit, rendering the claim time-barred, among other things.

A teenage child looks at the screen of a mobile phone on January 17, 2023 in London, England. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Google Reaches Multi-Million Dollar Settlement

Judge Pitts disagreed, finding instead that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit have legal standing to seek injunctive relief.

“No matter how un-sensitive or un-intimate the personal information collected here was,” the judge wrote, “the allegation that defendants collected the data in violation of federal law despite representing that their [”designed for families“] program apps did not engage in interest-based advertising suffices to show that defendants’ intrusion upon plaintiffs’ expectation of privacy was highly offensive.”

Judge Pitts also said the complaint specifically alleges that minors were tracked through various Android apps in Google’s DFF program, and not just Tiny Lab’s apps.

“The fact that Tiny Lab was removed from the Google Play Store in 2018 therefore does not on its own render plaintiffs’ claims time-barred,” he wrote.

“Here, plaintiffs have adequately pleaded that defendants were unjustly enriched by collecting plaintiffs’ personal information and employing it to target advertisements to children,” the judge concluded.

The latest lawsuit comes after Google in April agreed to pay $62 million to settle claims that it violated privacy laws by tracking and storing users’ location data without consent.

The Epoch Times has contacted a Google spokesperson for comment.