Android: million-dollar judgment against Google for background data transmission
If Android sends data to Google in the background, it can affect your mobile phone bill. According to a ruling, Google should take responsibility for this.
(Image: Primakov/Shutterstock.com)
Google is to pay Californian Android users a total of 314.6 million US dollars. This is the verdict of a Californian jury. The reason is that Google did not disclose that the Android cell phone operating system and Google apps transfer data to Google even when the phone is not being actively used and the apps are in the background or closed. The harvested data promoted Google's business, particularly its advertising business, the class action lawsuit claims.
In this case, however, it is not about data protection, but directly about money: the Android smartphones did not wait for WLAN access with a data flat rate to transfer data, but used up the data volume of the respective mobile phone contract. This was detrimental to users because it meant they had higher costs or were subject to earlier bandwidth throttling of their mobile connection.
The lawsuit was filed in 2019 as a class action on behalf of all natural persons residing in California who use an Android cell phone. The attorneys involved had studied the terms of use, the privacy policy and the contracts for Google Play (Terms of Use and Managed Google Play Agreement); they found no reference to data usage in the background.
The lawsuit also complains that Android lacks a setting option to restrict such unwanted data transfers to WLAN connections. Although Apple's cell phone operating system iOS shows similar behavior, it sends significantly less data in the background via mobile networks.
Nationwide class action follows
The plaintiffs have now been able to convince a jury of the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County(Csupo, Burke et Hecht v Google, Ref. 19CV352557). They ordered Google to pay 314,626,932 dollars. Google immediately announced that it would take legal action. The ruling misunderstands "services that are important to the security, performance and reliability of Android devices".
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The class action lawyers who prevailed in the first instance are delighted: this is probably the first time that a jury has classified unauthorized data consumption by a data company as "conversion". In Anglo-American law, conversion describes, in simple terms, the use of another person's property against the owner's interest. As a rule, conversion is applied to tangible property, but in this case to data volumes in mobile phone contracts.
"The victory sets a strong precedent for the burgeoning field of 'data-as-property' law and could open the door to a wave of class action lawsuits over surreptitious data practices," writes the law firm Bartlit Beck in a press release. It has already filed a second lawsuit against Google on the same facts, this time on behalf of Android users in the other 49 US states. Bartlit Beck is again being supported in the proceedings by the law firm Korein Tillery. The courtroom phase is scheduled for April 2026.
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