Alphabet's Google Faces Revived Chrome Lawsuit After Appeals Court Ruling

Google, which is owned tech giant Alphabet Inc. GOOGGOOGL, is required to face a dismissed class action lawsuit by Google Chrome users after U.S. appeals court decided to revive the case.

The suit was brought against Google for allegedly collecting Chrome users’ personal information without their permission after deciding to not synchronize their browsers with their Google accounts, Reuters reported. The proposed class covers Chrome users since July 27, 2016.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the lower court judge who dismissed the suit should have assessed whether Chrome users consented to allow Google to collect their data as they browsed online.

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Tuesday’s 3-0 decision comes after Google agreed last year to destroy billions of records to settle a suit claiming Google tracked people who thought they were browsing privately, even users browsing in Chrome’s “Incognito” mode.

Google did not immediately respond to Benzinga’s request for comment.

The lower court judge concluded Google’s general privacy policy allowing data collection governed because the company would have collected the plaintiffs’ information regardless of which browsers they used.

But Circuit Judge Milan Smith called that focus misplaced in Tuesday’s decision.

“Here, Google had a general privacy disclosure yet promoted Chrome by suggesting that certain information would not be sent to Google unless a user turned on sync,” Smith wrote. “A reasonable user would not necessarily understand that they were consenting to the data collection at issue.”

The appeals court returned the case to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, who dismissed it in December 2022.

Price Action: Alphabet gained 0.33% to close at $168.96 on Tuesday, while exchange-traded funds that track the stock trended downward for the most part.

• T-Rex 2X Long Alphabet Daily Target ETF GOOX rose 0.73%
• Vanguard Communication Services ETF VOX slipped 0.04%
• Communication Services Select Sector SPDR Fund XLC declined 0.07%
• IShares Global Comm Services ETF IXP went down 0.06%
• Fidelity MSCI Communication Services Index ETF FCOM dipped 0.15%

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