Legal action over claim Google tracked iphone users ‘could open floodgates’

A BILLION-POUND legal action against Google over claims it secretly tracked millions of iphone users’ internet activity would “open the floodgates” to mass data protection claims if it is allowed to go ahead, the Supreme Court has heard.

Former Which? director Richard Lloyd, supported by campaign group Google You Owe Us, wants to bring a “representative action” against the Us-based tech giant on behalf of around 4.4 million people in England and Wales. He claims Google “illegally misused the data of millions of iphone users”, through the “clandestine tracking and collation” of information about internet usage on iphones’ Safari browser, known as the “Safari workaround”.

Mr Lloyd and Google You Owe Us hope to win between £1 billion and £3bn in compensation for alleged breaches of the Data Protection Act.

The High Court initially ruled that Mr Lloyd could not serve the claim on Google outside the jurisdiction of England and

Wales in October 2018, but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in October 2019.

Yesterday, Google’s lawyers said that landmark ruling could “open the floodgates” to vast claims brought on behalf of millions of people against companies responsible for handling people’s data.

Antony White QC told the Supreme Court that “a number of substantial representative actions have been commenced seeking compensation for breach of data protection rights” since the Court of Appeal’s judgment.

Claims “brought on behalf of hundreds of thousands, and, at least in one case, millions, of individuals” have recently been launched against Facebook, Tiktok and Googleowned Youtube, the court heard.

Mr White said, in written submissions, that allowing such claims to be brought could have “profound and far-reaching implications across all civil litigation”. He argued that, under data protection laws, “compensation is only available for ‘damage’ suffered as a consequence of the (data) breach, and not for the breach itself”.

Mr White added that “the technical matters which gave rise to the ‘Safari workaround’ were rectified many years ago”.