A California federal judge permanently axed several claims Tuesday from an Android smartphone user's proposed class action accusing Google of illegally harvesting third-party app data to gain a competitive advantage, while finding that Google's alleged failure to disclose the practices was enough to allow a state law deception claim to move forward.
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Merely Monitoring App Activity Data Does Not Support a Claim Under California’s Invasion Of Privacy Act, But Is It Sufficient To Allege (Common-Law) Invasion of Privacy? Friday, February 19, 2021
In the ongoing action related to Alphabet Inc.’s alleged monitoring and tracking of non-Google applications on Android devices,
McCoy V. Alphabet, Inc. et al., No. 5:20-cv-05427, the Northern District of California recently granted Defendant a sweeping victory on most of Plaintiffs’ allegations, albeit with leave to amend. In a 25-page order on Defendant’s motion to dismiss, the court made it poignantly clear that “…disclosure of common, basic digital information to third parties [were not] as serious or egregious violations of social norms” to “adequately plead claims for invasion of privacy or intrusion upon seclusion”. However, failing to heed the court’s instruction, Plaintiff recently filed an amended complaint that in many respects
Filed by a bipartisan group of 38 attorneys-general.
December 18, 2020 01:51 GMT (17:51 PST) | Topic: Legal
Google has been sued again on antitrust allegations, this time by more than 30 US states, for abusing its market power to rearrange search results to squeeze out competition.
According to the legal complaint [PDF], Google methodically buried competitor sites and services in its own search results despite these competitors paying Google for advertising services and, at the same time, prominently displayed its own competing reviews or services. This prevented companies from creating specialised services that could have challenged Google s search engine, the complaint said. In this way, Google bars its own advertising customers from making their value known to consumers in a manner that would benefit competition, consumers, and advertisers. In so doing, Google degrades access provided