A jury in San Jose, California, said on Tuesday that Google had lowered customer mobile phones and had to pay more than $ 314.6 million to users of Android smartphones in the state, according to a lawyer for the complainants.
The jury agreed with the complainants that Google d’Alphabet was responsible for sending and receiving information from devices without authorization when they were inactive, causing what the trial had called “compulsory and inevitable charges shoulders by users of the Android device for the benefit of Google”.
Google’s spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a press release that the company would call on and that the verdict “misunderstood services that are essential for the safety, performance and reliability of Android devices”.
The lawyer for the complainants Glen Summers said that the verdict “strengthens the advantages of this case and reflects the gravity of Google’s misconduct”.
The complainants filed a collective appeal before the State Court in 2019 on behalf of around 14 million Californians. They argued that Google had collected information from inactive phones running its Android operating system for business uses such as targeted advertising, consuming cellular data from Android users at their expense.
Google told court that no Android user had been injured by data transfers and that users had granted them under the conditions of use of the company’s conditions and confidentiality.
Another group brought a separate legal action before the Federal Court of San Jose, providing the same complaints against Google in the name of Android users in the other 49 states. This case should be tried in April 2026.
