9th Circuit Is Urged to Reverse Dismissal of Chrome Users’ Privacy Claims

amicus brief Thursday (docket 22-16993) in the 9th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court. For more than two decades, Google and other internet companies have presented privacy as an issue of “user choice” and argued that their legal obligations “should only extend so far as the promises they have explicitly made,” it said. That “notice and choice” framework “has led to a massive expansion in commercial surveillance that has fueled harmful discrimination, enabled invasive profiling, and degraded user privacy across the internet ecosystem,” it said. In response to the recent trend of users demanding greater privacy protection, companies like Google “have made new privacy promises and offered new services that they claim protect user privacy,” it said. “This case is about what happens when a company purports to offer its users new privacy-protective settings on the one hand, but then continues to invade their privacy on the other,” it said. Google contends that even when it has explicitly promised its users that it will protect their data, “it doesn’t have to abide by that promise so long as it points to contrary terms in its general user agreement and statements posted in a sprawling web of disclosure pages,” said the brief. The U.S. District Court for Northern California’s ruling in Google’s favor “is a fundamental rejection of the reasonable consumer standard and would eliminate even the modicum of privacy that the common law currently provides to internet users,” it said. When Google makes specific privacy promises to Chrome users, the company shouldn’t be allowed “to override those promises with blanket disclaimers in its general user agreement,” it said. Internet users want strong privacy protections online, and companies like Google shouldn’t be “insulated from liability when they expand the scope of their disclosures beyond what users reasonably expect,” it said.