• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

The new real-time bidding (RTB) control "will make it very difficult for Google RTB auction participants to identify and/or track any class member who enables the RTB Control, and results in those class members no longer being tracked or targeted in RTB system for personalized ads," class counsel writes in a motion seeking approval of the settlement.

Counsel adds that the new control, if enabled, will remove all identifiers from the Google RTB bid request, "including encrypted Google User IDs and the device advertising IDs, thereby preventing the use of user lists for targeted advertising."

Activating the control will also remove IP addresses from the Google RTB bid request, and will prevent "cookie matching," according to the plaintiffs' lawyers.

The proposed settlement requires Google to maintain the control for at least three years.

If accepted by U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, the settlement will end a battle dating to March 2021, when Missouri resident Kimberley Woodruff and other users alleged that the company's real-time bidding ad system violates people's privacy by sharing their personal information with “thousands” of outside companies. Other Google users, including California and out-of-state residents, later joined in the complaint. Among other claims, the users said Google violated representations that it wouldn't share people's personal information.

Rogers said in an April 2024 ruling that the plaintiffs couldn't proceed as a class for monetary damages, writing that claims regarding damages would require a person-by-person determination.

She also rejected the users' request to certify a class for purposes of obtaining an injunction, but without prejudice -- meaning that the plaintiffs could beef up that request and bring it again.

Despite that ruling, she appeared to support the idea that Google should revise some real-time bidding practices.

“The injunctive relief sought would be an important step toward choice, accountability, and transparency,” she wrote.

“Google cannot run away from the common question of whether it promises its account holders that it would not sell their personal information and, if so, it violates that promise billions of times a day,” she added.

Privacy advocate Justin Brookman, director of technology policy at Consumer Reports, sounded an optimistic note about the settlement.

"RTB data sharing has been relatively unbounded for far too long," he says -- though he notes the FTC's case against Mobilewalla marked an exception. (The FTC late last year prosecuted Mobilewalla for allegedly obtaining consumers' location data from real-time bidding exchanges.)

"It's good to see that Google will be required to put some checks in place," Brookman adds.