Google swats away £3bn Safari Workaround ad-tracking cookie lawsuit in Supreme Court victory Google has successfully fought off a £3bn lawsuit brought in London over ad tracking cookies, beating the Google You Owe Us campaign in the Supreme Court of England and Wales. The case, brought in 2017, had "no real prospect of success", the Supreme Court unanimously ruled this morning, in a devastating blow for organisations …
That's exactly what I said and I got a bunch of down votes. Regardless of how scummy you think Google et al. are, this case was not about altruism or defending the poor and downtrodden. It was wasting the courts time in the hope of a big payout.
This is the key - how did you measure "material damage" in what is akin a "espionage act"? You may not know what was actually "stolen", and how it was or will be used to damage you. You may understand it months or even years later, and maybe not directly. How easy is for each user to understand, for example, if dynamic pricing is using those data to make them pay more? Because the use of those data is very far from being transparent, it's quite impossible to draw a direct line from the gathered data and any "material damage" a user can incur.
I am wondering if any of this behaviour by Google et al, can be classed as voyeurism, or invasion of privacy.
Since there is no statement or law that indicates that what you do on the internet is private, then it is difficult to stop being tracked.
With the IPA there is the concern that the government bodies can track your web history, and although all and sundry can see the history (i mean too many allowed), somehow the government are missing that wholesale tracking by corporations is already happening (by foul means too).
I don't know what privacy laws were in place in 2012 - still the question is exactly that. An invasion of privacy may not bring to immediate "material" damages. That way the court applied a restrictive assessment that it's difficult to apply to a domain that is mostly "immaterial".
The issue here is exactly you can't get any proof unless you force Google to show what it collected and how it used it. Something no user can do, unless they break in Google systems, or a whistleblowers tells it.
Because this is not a case when direct "material damage" can be caused. The use of those data can harm you - in ways that is very difficult to trace back to the root cause.
That's why privacy laws punish the collecting and access of data, regardless of any actual "material damage". Or do you mean that if someone steals and publish a database of gun owners, no actual "material damage" occurs until one is killed with one of those guns just stolen?
You mean you can sue someone installing flammable panels on a building, and you have to wait they put on fire the entire building, then causing "material damage"?
There are actions that are dangerous per se, and needing to prove they caused and actual material damages is stupid - and dangerous. It could be too late.
I think the courts were quite clear that they expected the appelants to collect testimony, not necessarily direct causal evidence. But they didn't even gather enough testimony to demonstrate how this information was purportedly harmful or implemented illegally.
You can't go around making statements like "obviously illegal" in court filings; you have to demonstrate exactly how something is illegal in a preponderance of related cases.
"hat way the court applied a restrictive assessment that it's difficult to apply to a domain that is mostly "immaterial"."
But that's not what the court said. The court said making no attempt to assess or quantify damages was not acceptable. It wasn't ruling on the extent of materiality - it was ruling on the fact that materiality wasn't attempted to be established - a subtle but important difference.
If there was no gain to Google, then they wouldn't be doing it.
The person having it done to them is loosing out, since they have lost anonymity and are providing data to Google to monetise, therefore they are loosing out by giving something (under duress) and getting nothing back.
I wonder if they can turn this argument on its head since people don't do anything for nothing and its generally accepted that its impossible to prove a negative, but it is possible to prove a positive.
Because...
"In a statement a Google spokeswoman said: "This claim was related to events that took place a decade ago and that we addressed at the time. People want to know that they are safe and secure online, which is why for years we've focused on building products and infrastructure that respect and protect people's privacy."
Again, you fucking liar
If she kept a straight face I definitely want to play poker with her.
I nearly choked when I read this bit, just because it is such a bare faced lie*
*Unless of course she was referring to all those 'other people' who would collect and abuse your data. Google of course wouldn't as they are such a responsible company.
*Choke* *Choke* Silence.................
If you have to show Google made wrongful use of the data or you suffered material harm. How the heck are individual consumers supposed to know what Google is doing behind the scenes? Unless someone in the know leaks documentation/emails that prove their case for them, almost any amount of privacy raping will go unpunished because individual consumers won't be able to prove it hurt them specifically!
Even with juicy leaks the courts might find for Google because even if they acknowledge doing it in a general sense to everyone, it would still have to be linked to harm to specific people. Sort like if they catch a guy who admits to raping "most of the women in this dorm" but specific women can't produce the DNA evidence to prove they were one of the "most".
"So the takeaway from this is that taking data unlawfully is OK, as long as the one you took it from can't explicitly, and on an individual basis, point to the damage this caused?"
No, that's the exact opposite of the situation here. The UKSC just said that there is no doubt individual cases can be pursued.
This story is about a failure to wrap all the individual cases up into a class action by twisting some legal principles. It is clearly not possible to have a class action when the members of the proposed class have suffered very different amounts of damage.
Technically correct, however how can individuals afford to take action? They cannot, and no one would take the case either as there would not be a way of demonstrating the level of damage that they they could take payment from. Therefore the court has said fuck it Google can do what they like.
Individuals have already done that. This was bandwagon-jumping by the litigation funders based on the previously obtained ruling.
It doesn't cost anything significant to bring an action where there is already a ruling that directly covers the case. Filing fees, which could be claimed back.
And you don't need to 'demonstrate the level of damage'; that's what the 'distress' part is about.
This will be an unpopular view amongst those who want to see Google’s wings clipped (a group to which I belong) but the judgement may be good for UK law*, in that it upholds the requirement to show damage in order to claim compensation for it. IANAL, but have studied commercial law, UK law requires three things to be proven when seeking compensation:
- actual damage (which can be broadly interpreted- the Clapham omnibus rule),
- the defendant had a duty of care, and
- the defendant’s action (or inaction) led to the damage.
We are regularly amazed (and sometimes laugh) at the antics in US courts: this decision is one reason we don’t get similar cases in the UK.
*Strictly speaking, not UK law, as there are differences between, for example, English and Scottish law - but the same principles apply across the jurisdictions.
The court most certainly did not insist that every individual member file their own suit. They mandated that there has to be evidence and testimony collected from them to demonstrate how they were damaged.
But it is easy to forget things like "burden of proof" when you've got those multi-billion dollar and pound signs spinning in your empty head...
to break into your home, as long as you don't realize I stole anything. If you can't prove it's missing, then there is no crime.
Thanks judge, here's your buttcoins.
PS: NOBODY, not even the military..... NOBODY gets into googles offshore servers. You will never see what they took.
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