Federal Jury Finds Google Liable for Tracking App Activity of About 98 Million Users Who Opted Out

On September 3, 2025, a federal jury in San Francisco returned a verdict against Google in Rodriguez v. Google, a privacy class action that had been pending in the Northern District of California since 2020. The jury found Google liable for invasion of privacy and intrusion upon seclusion and awarded $425,651,947 in compensatory damages to two certified classes covering about 98 million users.

The case turned on a single setting. Google's account controls included Web & App Activity, which users could switch off to stop Google from saving their activity. The plaintiffs, whose named representatives included Anibal Rodriguez and Julian Santiago, said Google kept collecting data about what people did inside third-party apps anyway, through analytics software that app developers had built into their products. The classes covered users who had turned the setting off between July 2016 and September 2024.

The trial ran for nearly three weeks before a jury and Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg. Plaintiffs' counsel from Boies Schiller Flexner, Susman Godfrey and Morgan & Morgan tried the case together. John Yanchunis was part of the plaintiffs' team; Law360 later named him one of its 2025 Cybersecurity and Privacy MVPs, crediting his role in the verdict. Google argued that the data it collected was not tied to individual identities. After about ten hours of deliberation over two days, the jury found that the users had not consented to the collection even with the setting switched off.

The jury rejected the claims under California's computer fraud statute, declined to order Google to hand over its profits, and found insufficient evidence of malice, oppression or fraud to support punitive damages. The compensatory award was the whole of the verdict. The court had certified the classes in January 2024, and the case reached trial after a denial of summary judgment in January 2025, five years after the first complaint was filed.

After trial, on January 30, 2026, Judge Seeborg denied Google's attempt to decertify the classes. He also denied the plaintiffs' request for additional disgorgement and a permanent injunction, finding the requested profit estimate insufficiently supported. In August 2026 he refused Google's bid to throw out the verdict, writing that the decision to credit the plaintiffs' evidence was the province of the jury, and he also denied the plaintiffs' motion for a new trial. Google filed a notice of appeal to the Ninth Circuit in September 2026.