Google searchers of yore win $23 million privacy penalty
www.theregister.com
Chocolate Factory agrees $23m guilt-free settlement
  • just_change_it@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1172·
    1 year ago

    Class action lawsuit becomes mechanism to earn big payday for lawyers with little benefit to claimants. More at 11.

      • LifeInOregon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        52·
        1 year ago

        Except the amounts nuts corporations like Google are paying out amounts to just hours of business. It’s not punitive in any way. These low-ball payouts are just a minor cost of doing business for them, and not a disincentive from future bad behavior.

      • just_change_it@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        In practice I don’t think this ever truly happens. Not doing evil shit costs way more than paying out years after you’re caught and making way more money.

  • philomory@lemm.eeEnglish
    233·
    1 year ago

    I’m always keen to shit on Google, but, this is about “having search terms in the query string” and “having links that take you directly to the thing you clicked on without any redirect dance to obfuscate the Referer header”. With all the other shit to legitimately complain about from Google, this seems so silly to focus on. Google isn’t even the one that sent the Referer header, that would be your browser (which, Chrome didn’t exist yet at the time). RFC1945, from 1996, for HTTP 1.0, even explicitly stated that any application that communicates over HTTP (i.e. a web browser) should offer the user a configuration option to disable sending Referer headers.

    Edit: slight clarification, Chrome did exist during part of the time period that the lawsuit covers, though it only started to pick up serious market share towards the end of the relevant time period.

    • kautau@lemmy.worldEnglish
      271·
      1 year ago

      It’s a stupid lawsuit, but it does ensure a precedent that search engines should sanitize the referer when sending you to a link you click on. If some unsuspecting user accidentally types their credit card number into google and clicks on a shady website that says CHECK VISA FRAUD, that website absolutely shouldn’t get the data of what the person typed in while doing the search.

  • YⓄ乙 English
    8·
    1 year ago

    I blocked most of the google connections on my android phone and phone still works without any issues. Not sure why google connects to all these server at 3am.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    About 2.5 million people who clicked on a Google Search link between October 25, 2006, and September 30, 2013 can expect to receive $7.16 to compensate them for claims of violated privacy, after an epic legal battle with the ad giant.

    In July, Clifford Weiler, a retired attorney and a claimant in the case, filed an objection, saying that given the nature of the alleged violations, Google’s size and revenue, and duration of the misconduct, the settlement is far too low.

    “The small amount provided to each claimant in the proposed settlement invokes concern that this may be a friendly lawsuit to clear the defendant as the plaintiff’s team of attorneys receives voluminous fees and costs for basically moving papers around,” he wrote.

    The 13-year-old case, as outlined in the second amended complaint [PDF] from 2012, alleged that Google violated the privacy of people using its search engine.

    Web owners back then would receive these search terms when a searcher clicked on their link: The full URL with query parameters would be passed via the Referer header.

    In any event, around 2010, Google began testing the encryption of search keywords in the Referer header and by 2011 announced the change.

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