• by Wendy Davis , 8 hours ago

Google has agreed to pay $8.25 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit over alleged data collection from children's devices.

The proposed settlement, unveiled in court papers filed Tuesday, comes in a complaint filed in June 2023 by parents of six young children who allegedly downloaded apps from Android's Play Store -- including games developed by Tiny Lab Productions, such as Fun Kid Racing and Monster Truck Racing.

Those apps were designated by Google as “Designed for Families,” a now deprecated program that required developers to certify compliance with the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. That law prohibits app developers from knowingly collecting personal data, including device identifiers, from children younger than 13 without their parents' consent.

A group of parents led by California resident Jen Turner alleged in a class-action complaint that Google's AdMob wrongly collected smartphone data from those apps, and that Google should have known that the data was coming from children.

Google lost a key legal battle in the case in 2024, when U.S. District Court Judge P. Casey Pitts in the Northern District of California rejected the company's bid to dismiss the case as untimely.

Google had unsuccessfully argued that it banned Tiny Lab from the Play Store in 2018, and that the statute of limitations for most claims in the lawsuit expired before the suit was filed.

But attorneys for the plaintiffs countered that even if Google banned Tiny Lab, AdMob allegedly continued through 2021 to collect data from children who had downloaded the apps.

Class counsel presented the proposed settlement to Pitts the same day that a different district court judge -- Susan van Keulen, also in the Northern District of California -- granted final approval to Google's $30 million settlement of a separate lawsuit dealing with children's privacy.

That settlement, which secured preliminary approval in September, resolved a lawsuit dating to 2019, when California resident Nicole Hubbard sued YouTube and various channel operators -- including Cartoon Network, DreamWorks, Mattel and Hasbro -- on behalf of her 5-year-old child, who viewed YouTube channels aimed at young children.