Google Accord With Harvard Tie Fails Judge’s Smell Test

Google’s settlement of a privacy lawsuit probably won’t win approval because it includes a donation to an Internet research center at Harvard University and to other schools that attorneys who brought the case attended, a judge said.

US District Judge Edward Davila voiced his concerns at a hearing in San Jose (CA) over the settlement of a suit claiming the company transferred personal information contained in user searches to third parties including marketers and data brokers. The proposed accord includes several million dollars of funding for privacy research earmarked for institutes at Harvard, Stanford University and Chicago-Kent College of Law. “The elephant in the room is that many of them are law schools that you attended,” Judge Davila said. The judge said he had expected a wider net to be cast, and that it was exactly the same list of recipients as the lawyers presented to him a year ago. “I’m disappointed that the usual suspects are still usual,” Judge Davila said. The lack of transparency in the selection process “raises a red flag” and “doesn’t pass the smell test,” he said.