• by Wendy Davis , September 4, 2025

A jury in San Francisco determined Wednesday that Google should pay $425 million for violating mobile device owners' privacy by allegedly collecting analytics data after they attempted to prevent the company from doing so.

The verdict, issued after an 11-day trial, came in a legal battle over Google Analytics for Firebase -- a tool that can collect data about people's app usage.

Anibal Rodriguez and others alleged in a 2020 class-action complaint that Google “intentionally created an illusion of user control” through its “Web & App Activity” settings, which users can toggle off if they don't want to save searches and activity in their Google account.

Rodriguez and the others alleged that even when users turn off the setting, Google uses its Firebase code “to collect users’ communications made via the apps on users’ devices."

The jury specifically determined that the plaintiffs proved two claims -- "intrusion upon seclusion" and "invasion of privacy."

Google spokesperson José Castañeda says the company will appeal.

"This decision misunderstands how our products work," he says. "Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalization, we honor that choice."

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg had instructed the jurors that the plaintiffs could establish the "invasion of privacy" claim if they proved that they had an "objectively reasonable" expectation of privacy, and that Google engaged in "highly offensive" conduct -- which he defined as a "shocking or outrageous breach of social norms regarding online data."

He issued a similar instruction regarding the "intrusion upon seclusion" claim.

The plaintiffs had sought more than $30 billion in damages. After the trial, jurors reportedly awarded $425 million because they believed the data at issue had some value, but declined to award more because they didn't believe users had been harmed by Google, according to Courthouse News.

The verdict marks the second time this summer that a jury has found a tech company violated people's privacy by collecting data. Last month, a jury in California determined that Meta Platforms wrongly collected information about users of the menstrual tracking app Flo.

Earlier this year, Seeborg rejected Google's bid to dismiss the matter before trial.

Google had argued that its privacy policy accurately described the Web and App Activity setting. Google also said the analytics data was “non-personal,” and that its privacy policies disclosed that the company could use “non-personal information for basic record-keeping.”

Google added that no reasonable smartphone user would have expected the Web & App Activity setting to “disable the entire data flow from the app to Google.”

Seeborg rejected that argument, writing that Google's disclosures about the Web and App Activity setting were ambiguous.

Seeborg added that even pseudonymous information can be considered personal information in California, noting that the state's privacy statute defines personal information as data that could be linked to a consumer, household, IP address or other unique identifier.