By Mike Scarcella
Lawyers who negotiated a class action privacy settlement with Google are entitled to just a fraction of the $128 million in fees they sought as an award for their work, a U.S. federal judge ruled, finding that the attorneys achieved only limited success. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland on Thursday approved the settlement, which requires Google to provide a new privacy controls but does not include any payment to class members.
She awarded the plaintiffs’ lawyers $21.8 million in legal fees as class counsel in the case, slashing the amount of their request by 80%.
The lead attorneys for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit was filed in 2021 and accused Google of sharing and selling personal information to third parties in Google’s real-time bidding (RTB) auction service for digital advertising. The consumer lawyers said the settlement would give millions of U.S. Google account holders greater control over their privacy by allowing them to limit the information Google shares about them in the ad auctions.
In a statement, Google said it does not sell or share personal data and that “we already have the strictest real-time bidding restrictions in the industry.” The company said it was “pleased to put this case behind us.”
Lawyers for the consumers told the court they spent more than 46,500 hours over four years on the litigation. An expert working for the plaintiffs placed the overall value of the settlement at more than $1 billion, court records show.
Gonzalez Rogers in her order called the settlement adequate “but by no means excellent.” She said the plaintiffs’ estimate of the settlement value was “purely speculative” and questioned whether the privacy controls would meaningfully impact Google.
Google had opposed the $128 million fee request, urging the court to award the attorneys about $14 million.
The case is In re Google RTB Consumer Privacy Litigation, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 4:21-cv-02155-YGR.
