Privacy activists can sue Google in UK over Safari tracking, court decides

A group of privacy activists in England have won permission to sue Google in that country over its tricking of Apple’s Safari browser into accepting its tracking cookies, even when the browser settings forbade this.

The judge dealing with the case argued that it should be heard in an English court, because it dealt with a “developing area” of English law, and because it was unreasonable to expect a small group of individuals to spend a fortune suing Google in the US when the alleged damage was done in England. The Honourable Mr Justice Tugendhat rejected Google’s claim that the relevant data was not private because it was anonymized, saying that didn’t stop it from making the claimants identifiable: “I find this a surprising submission to be made on behalf of Google Inc. It would not collect and collate the information unless doing so enabled it to produce something of value.” He also pointed out that the claimants were just individual residents of the UK, and for them to sue in the US would cost them a fortune. “The issues of English law raised by Google are complicated ones, and in a developing area,” he said.