19 AGs Urge Reversal of Chrome Summary Judgment Decision in Google’s Favor

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and the AGs of 18 other states support the appeal by six Chrome users to reverse the district court’s dismissal of their privacy complaint alleging that Chrome secretly sent users’ personal information to Google (see 2312130029), said the AGs’ amicus brief Monday (docket 22-16993) in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The states have an interest in ensuring that Google “is held accountable when it abuses their citizens’ trust,” said the AGs’ brief. It’s an interest that has led every state “to pursue Google for its deceptive trade practices in collecting data,” said the AGs, 12 of them Republican, seven Democrats.

The states have a further interest “in courts construing online agreements in favor of ordinary consumers rather than the giant tech companies that draft the agreements while holding the keys to the internet,” said the brief. Because the plaintiff-appellants allege that Google violated its agreements and stole their personal information for profit, “this case implicates those state interests,” it said.

Starting as a small search engine, Google has developed an “integrated suite” of products and services that allow Google users to access “Google-run networks through Google-created applications on Google-branded smartphones,” said the brief. But those “loyal users” aren’t Google’s “primary customers,” it said. “That distinction goes to online advertisers who pay Google to assist them to target their messages to users most likely to buy their products,” it said.

The plaintiffs in this case allege that Google violated their trust, said the brief. They allege that they chose not to sync their Chrome browsers to a Google account and understood, based on Google’s own privacy agreements, that this would give them control over their personal information, it said.

But Google collected their personal information anyway and claimed consent, and the U.S. District Court for Northern California agreed and granted summary judgment for Google, said the brief. The court reached that conclusion “only after neglecting the reasonable-user standard, collating multiple agreements, and considering technical evidence provided by experts that would have been unavailable to the users whose information was surreptitiously gathered,” it said. “That was error,” and the 9th Circuit should reverse, it said.