• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 2, 2023

Google has defeated a lawsuit brought by Minnesota and New York residents who claimed the company violated state privacy laws by retaining data about consumers' streaming video rentals.

In a decision issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California said New York and Minnesota privacy laws don't allow individuals to sue companies that fail to delete data regarding video rentals.

The ruling comes in a dispute dating to last October, when Minneapolis resident Burke Minahan alleged in a class-action complaint that Google violated a state privacy law by maintaining a record of all videos he rented from the platform since 2018, when he first used the company's streaming rental service.

Among other provisions, the Minnesota law requires that "videotape service providers” destroy personally identifiable information no later than one year from when it's no longer needed by the company that collected it.

Minahan's suit was later joined by New York residents, who alleged the company was violating a similar New York video privacy law. Both state laws also prohibit companies from disclosing video rental records without consumers' consent.

Google argued to Rogers that the laws only allowed consumers to sue over disclosures of their information, as opposed to failing to destroy the data.

Rogers accepted that argument, noting that earlier this year Apple prevailed in a similar lawsuit brought by New York and Minnesota residents.

In that case, U.S. District Court Judge Haywood Gilliam, also in the Northern District of California, said the laws in those states didn't allow consumers to sue over data retention. The consumers in that matter recently filed an appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.