{"id":304574,"date":"2026-01-26T15:53:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T15:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/304574\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T15:53:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T15:53:11","slug":"google-settles-google-assistant-privacy-lawsuit-for-68-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/304574\/","title":{"rendered":"Google settles Google Assistant privacy lawsuit for $68 million"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/quotes\/GOOGL\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Google<\/a> agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming that \u2060its voice-activated assistant spied inappropriately on smartphone users, violating \u200dtheir privacy.<\/p>\n<p>A preliminary \u200dclass action \u200dsettlement was filed late Friday night in the San Jose, California federal court, and \u200crequires approval \u200cby U.S. District Judge Beth \u200bLabson Freeman. Smartphone users accused Google, a unit of Alphabet, of illegally recording and disseminating private conversations after Google \u2060Assistant was triggered, in order to send them targeted advertising.<\/p>\n<p>Google Assistant is designed to react when people use &#8220;hot words&#8221; such as &#8220;Hey Google&#8221; or &#8220;Okay Google,&#8221; similar to Apple&#8217;s Siri.<\/p>\n<p>Users objected to receiving ads after Google Assistant misperceived what they said as hot words, known as &#8220;false accepts.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Apple reached a similar $95 million settlement with smartphone users in December 2024.<\/p>\n<p>Google denied wrongdoing, but \u200dsettled to avoid the risk, cost and uncertainty \u200cof litigation, court papers \u2060show. The Mountain View, California-based company declined to comment on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>The settlement covers people who \u200dbought Google devices or were subjected to false accepts since May 18, 2016, court papers show.<\/p>\n<p>Lawyers for plaintiffs may seek up to one-third of the settlement fund, \u2060or about $22.7 million, for \u200clegal fees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming that \u2060its voice-activated assistant spied inappropriately on&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[6565,860,207,18,19,17,4075,103887,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-304574","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-alphabet-class-a","9":"tag-breaking-news-technology","10":"tag-business-news","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-lawsuits","15":"tag-products-and-services","16":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115962210186617446","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}