The U.K.’s Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously allowed Google’s appeal against a Court of Appeal judgment that would have allowed a representative action to be pursued against Google by approximately 4 million iPhone users in relation to Google’s unauthorized collection of their data
Google won its bid to dismiss a data privacy lawsuit filed on behalf of millions of iPhone users after the U.K.’s top court said the tech giant couldn’t be served with a class-action suit.
The Supreme Court said in a statement that it “unanimously dismisses” the legal action brought by campaigners against the US-based tech giant on behalf of 4.4 million people in England and Wales.
“In order to recover compensation for any given individual, it would be necessary to show both that Google made some unlawful use of personal data relating to that individual and that individual suffered some damage as a result,” Judge George Leggatt said in the ruling.
“Without proof of these matters, a claim for damages cannot succeed,” the Supreme Court writes, summarizing its judgment.
If the court had allowed the lawsuit to proceed, a fine worth 3.2 billion pounds ($4.3 billion) would have been imposed on Google in the hotly-anticipated judgment.
The ruling is a major blow to UK campaigners’ hopes of being able to bring class action-style suits against the tracking industry.
“This claim was related to events that took place a decade ago and that we addressed at the time,” a spokesperson for Google said by email to media outlets. “People want to know that they are safe and secure online, which is why for years we’ve focused on building products and infrastructure that respect and protect people’s privacy.”
The Supreme Court writes, summarizing its judgment as blow:
CONCLUSION :
158. The judge took the view that, even if the legal foundation for the claim made in this action were sound, he should exercise the discretion conferred by CPR rule 19.6(2) by refusing to allow the claim to be continued as a representative action. He characterised the claim as “officious litigation, embarked upon on behalf of individuals who have not authorised it” and in which the main beneficiaries of any award of damages would be the funders and the lawyers. He thought that the representative claimant “should not be permitted to consume substantial resources in the pursuit of litigation on behalf of others who have little to gain from it, and have not authorised Page 58 the pursuit of the claim, nor indicated any concern about the matters to be litigated”: [2019] 1 WLR 1265, paras 102-104. The Court of Appeal formed a very different view of the merits of the representative claim. They regarded the fact that the members of the represented class had not authorised the claim as an irrelevant factor, which the judge had wrongly taken into account, and considered that it was open to them to exercise the discretion afresh. They saw this litigation as the only way of obtaining a civil compensatory remedy for what, if proved, was a “wholesale and deliberate misuse of personal data without consent, undertaken with a view to commercial profit”: see [2020] QB 747, para 86. In these circumstances the Court of Appeal took the view that, as a matter of discretion, the claim should be allowed to proceed.
159. It is unnecessary to decide whether the Court of Appeal was entitled to interfere with the judge’s discretionary ruling or whether it would be desirable for a commercially funded class action to be available on the facts alleged in this case. This is because, regardless of what view of it is taken, the claim has no real prospect of success. That in turn is because, in the way the claim has been framed in order to try to bring it as a representative action, the claimant seeks damages under section 13 of the DPA 1998 for each individual member of the represented class without attempting to show that any wrongful use was made by Google of personal data relating to that individual or that the individual suffered any material damage or distress as a result of a breach of the requirements of the Act by Google. For the reasons explained in this judgment, without proof of these matters, a claim for damages cannot succeed.
160. I would therefore allow the appeal and restore the order made by the judge refusing the claimant’s application for permission to serve the proceedings on Google outside the jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.
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