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SAN FRANCISCO/PARIS: Alphabet’s Google was told by a federal jury in the US on Wednesday to pay $425 million for invading users’ privacy and slapped with a fine of 325 million euros ($381 million) in France for a similar offense.

The jury found the tech giant of guilty of violations by continuing to collect data for millions of users who had switched off a tracking feature in their Google account.

The verdict comes after a trial in the federal court in San Francisco over allegations that Google over an eight-year period accessed users’ mobile devices to collect, save, and use their data, violating privacy assurances under its Web & App Activity setting.
The users had been seeking more than $31 billion in damages.
The jury found Google liable on two of the three claims of privacy violations brought by the plaintiffs. The jury found that Google had not acted with malice, meaning it was not entitled to any punitive damages.
A spokesperson for Google confirmed the verdict. Google had denied any wrongdoing.
The class action lawsuit, filed in July 2020, claimed Google continued to collect users’ data even with the setting turned off through its relationship with apps such as Uber, Venmo and Meta’s Instagram that use certain Google analytics services.
At trial, Google said the collected data was “nonpersonal, pseudonymous, and stored in segregated, secured, and encrypted locations.” Google said the data was not associated with users’ Google accounts or any individual user’s identity.
US District Judge Richard Seeborg certified the case as a class action covering about 98 million Google users and 174 million devices.
Google has faced other privacy lawsuits, including one earlier this year where it paid nearly $1.4 billion in a settlement with Texas over allegations the company violated the state’s privacy laws.
Google in April 2024 agreed to destroy billions of data records of users’ private browsing activities to settle a lawsuit that alleged it tracked people who thought they were browsing privately, including in “Incognito” mode. 

In France, the data protection authority Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) said ordered Google to pay 325 million euros ($381 million) for improperly displaying ads to Gmail users and using cookies, both without Google account users’ consent.
The CNIL also gave Google six months to ensure ads are no longer displayed between emails in Gmail users’ inboxes without prior consent, and that users give valid consent to the creation of a Google account for the placement of ad trackers.
Failing that, Google and its Irish subsidiary would both have to pay a penalty of 100,000 euros per day of delay, CNIL said in a statement.
A Google spokesperson said the company was reviewing the decision and said that users have always been able to control the ads they see in their products.
In the past two years, Google has made updates to address the commission’s concerns, including an easy way to decline personalized ads when creating a Google account, and changes to the way ads are presented in Gmail, the spokesperson said.

PARIS: American artificial intelligence firm OpenAI said Tuesday it would add parental controls to its chatbot ChatGPT, a week after an American couple said the system encouraged their teenaged son to kill himself.
“Within the next month, parents will be able to... link their account with their teen’s account” and “control how ChatGPT responds to their teen with age-appropriate model behavior rules,” the generative AI company said in a blog post.
Parents will also receive notifications from ChatGPT “when the system detects their teen is in a moment of acute distress,” OpenAI added.
Matthew and Maria Raine argue in a lawsuit filed last week in a California state court that ChatGPT cultivated an intimate relationship with their son Adam over several months in 2024 and 2025 before he took his own life.
The lawsuit alleges that in their final conversation on April 11, 2025, ChatGPT helped 16-year-old Adam steal vodka from his parents and provided technical analysis of a noose he had tied, confirming it “could potentially suspend a human.”
Adam was found dead hours later, having used the same method.
“When a person is using ChatGPT it really feels like they’re chatting with something on the other end,” said attorney Melodi Dincer of The Tech Justice Law Project, which helped prepare the legal complaint.
“These are the same features that could lead someone like Adam, over time, to start sharing more and more about their personal lives, and ultimately, to start seeking advice and counsel from this product that basically seems to have all the answers,” Dincer said.
Product design features set the scene for users to slot a chatbot into trusted roles like friend, therapist or doctor, she said.
Dincer said the OpenAI blog post announcing parental controls and other safety measures seemed “generic” and lacking in detail.
“It’s really the bare minimum, and it definitely suggests that there were a lot of (simple) safety measures that could have been implemented,” she added.
“It’s yet to be seen whether they will do what they say they will do and how effective that will be overall.”
The Raines’ case was just the latest in a string that have surfaced in recent months of people being encouraged in delusional or harmful trains of thought by AI chatbots — prompting OpenAI to say it would reduce models’ “sycophancy” toward users.
“We continue to improve how our models recognize and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress,” OpenAI said Tuesday.
The company said it had further plans to improve the safety of its chatbots over the coming three months, including redirecting “some sensitive conversations... to a reasoning model” that puts more computing power into generating a response.
“Our testing shows that reasoning models more consistently follow and apply safety guidelines,” OpenAI said.