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Google has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging that its voice-activated assistant secretly recorded users of smart devices, violating their privacy.
A tentative settlement was filed Friday in federal court in San Jose, California, but still requires approval from U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman.
The tech giant was accused of illegally recording and distributing private conversations after activating the Google Assistant tool so it could send targeted ads.
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Google has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging that its voice-activated assistant secretly recorded users of smart devices. (Getty Images / Getty Images)
Google Assistant, which is supposed to record only when a user says phrases like “Hey Google” or “Okay Google” or when someone manually presses a button on the device, inappropriately recorded personal conversations when these “hotwords” were not being used, without the knowledge of users of Google smartphones, home speakers, laptops, tablets, Chromecast media players and even wireless earphones, the lawsuit said.
Users claimed they were targeted with ads based on things they said when they hadn’t tried to activate their smart devices with a hotword.
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The tech giant was accused of illegally recording and distributing private conversations after activating the Google Assistant tool so it could send targeted ads. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images/Getty Images)
Google did not acknowledge any wrongdoing but said it decided to settle to avoid the “uncertainty, risks, costs, inconvenience and distraction” of lengthy litigation, according to court documents.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys can seek up to one-third of the settlement fund, or about $22.7 million, in legal fees.
Apple reached a similar settlement with smartphone users over its virtual assistant Siri in December 2024 for $95 million.
Google did not acknowledge any wrongdoing but said it decided to settle to avoid the “uncertainty, risks, costs, inconvenience and distraction” of lengthy litigation. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images/Getty Images)
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Google has settled other privacy complaints in the past, including one filed last spring when it agreed to pay $1.4 billion to Texas to settle a lawsuit alleging the company collected user data without consent.
In September, it was also ordered to pay $425.7 million for violating user privacy by collecting data on millions of people who had disabled a tracking feature in their Google account.
In 2024, the company agreed to destroy billions of data records of users’ private browsing activities to settle a lawsuit accusing it of tracking people who thought they were browsing privately, including in “incognito mode.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
