Judge throws out Google privacy policy case, notes “users are the real product”

A federal court in California has again dismissed a class action lawsuit brought by Google users who claim the search giant broke the law when it combined the privacy policies of Gmail, YouTube and a variety of other services.

In a decision in San Jose, US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal used frank language to shoot down the lawsuit: “[He] must do more than point to the dollars in a defendant’s pocket; he must sufficiently allege that in the process he lost dollars of his own,” wrote, Judge Grewal, explaining that the users had failed to show that Google had harmed them in any meaningful way. Judge Grewal also noted that users in the Google case, and in a stack of similar cases over data privacy, faced a legal hurdle called “injury-in-fact” that the judge said could “reasonably be described as Kilimanjaro.” In Europe, however, it has not been smooth sailing for Google and the new combined privacy policy. In November 2013, a German court slammed the policy as too vague while Dutch authorities warned that “Google spins an invisible web of our personal data, without our consent.”