$2.15 For Privacy Violations: Google+ Class Action Members Receiving Payout
Google has started to pay out a handsome $2.15 settlement to those who filled a legal form as one of the many Google+ users affected by a data leak that the company initially tried to ignore. Google+ — arguably one of Big G’s greatest failures — was launched back in 2011 to challenge the social media juggernaut that was Facebook. The company tried aggressive integration with other popular services such as YouTube and Drive to boost adoption, but even a massive redesign and millions spent in marketing couldn’t save the service from a permanent relocation to the infamous Google Graveyard in 2019.
The service had its fair share of controversies in its decade-long lifespan. To give it a push, Google Reader had to lose some of its key social features — a move that received significant backlash from users. The decision to require users that they use their real name to sign up for the service was also criticized and reversed soon after. Another weird product decision was mandating a Google+ account for commenting on YouTube videos, something even YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim was not too happy about. However, one of the final nails in the coffin was a privacy violation that led to the shutdown of Google+ for good.
Courtesy of the Google+ Profile Litigation, Google+ users who signed up as a class member following a class action lawsuit are now being paid $2.15 via PayPal or electronic bank-to-bank payment. As part of the settlement that was approved by the court, Google was ordered to pay $7.5 million, a sum that was supposed to cover the legal and administrative costs, with the rest issued to members as a payment. Now, the number of Settlement Class Members stands at 1,720,029, with each one entitled to a measly payout of $2.15. For those that signed as one of the claimants before the October 8 deadline last year, they will receive the settlement payout before August 14, 2021. More importantly, accepting the payout means the affected party will no longer be able to sue Google.
In 2018, a report by The Wall Street Journal unearthed details of a bug that exposed the private profile information of hundreds of thousands of Google+ users. Google was reportedly aware of the issue, but chose to remain silent fearing damage to its reputation and the regulatory scrutiny that would likely follow. The company apparently wanted to avoid the media scrutiny around Big Tech after Facebook’s own Cambridge Analytica fiasco, but trying to keep it quiet ended up killing an ambitious project in its entirety. Google’s own investigation into the issue, as part of its Project Strobe, revealed that up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were affected by the API flaw which let developers and third-parties access user details, including name, email address, occupation, gender, and age from private profiles.
Developers were reportedly able to access the user information from private Google+ profiles for a long spell between 2015 and 2018, even though Google claims that there were no incidents of data misuse. More importantly, Google chose not to notify users affected by the flaw, which is what invited the class action lawsuit in the first place. The key repercussion of the incident following Google’s eventual disclosure was shutting down Google+ access to consumers citing low user engagement. The company also launched more granular account permissions, updated its user data policy for the Gmail API, and even limited an Android app’s ability to access call logs and SMS permissions.
Source: Google+ Profile Litigation, WSJ, Google