Lawyers described these ad sales as illicit gains deserving over $30 billion in damages.

An American federal jury ordered the tech giant Google to pay $425.7 million for improperly spying on customers’ smartphones over a decade.

The ruling, issued Wednesday in a federal court in San Francisco after a trial lasting more than two weeks, involved a class-action lawsuit covering about 98 million smartphones operating in the U.S. between July 1, 2016, and September 23, 2024.

This means total damages in the five-year-old case amount to about $4 per device.

Google denied that it improperly tracked the electronic activities of those who believed they had protected themselves using privacy controls.

The company maintained its position despite the eight-person jury concluding that Google had spied in violation of California privacy laws.

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said Thursday: “This decision does not understand how our products work, and we will appeal the ruling.”

Castaneda added: “Our privacy tools enable people to control their data, and when they turn that off, we respect that choice.”

The lawyers who filed the lawsuit argued that Google used data collected from smartphones without users’ permission to help sell ads targeted to individual users’ interests—a strategy that generated billions of dollars in additional revenue for the company.

These lawyers described the ad sales as illicit gains deserving over $30 billion in damages.

Source: AP