A federal jury decided on Wednesday that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, must pay $425 million for violating users’ privacy by continuing to gather data from millions of users who had disabled a tracking feature in their Google accounts.

This verdict follows a trial in the San Francisco federal court, which addressed claims that Google, over an eight-year period, accessed users’ mobile devices to collect, store, and utilize their data, thereby breaching privacy commitments associated with 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, initiated in July 2020, alleged that Google kept collecting users’ data even when the setting was turned off, through its partnerships with applications like Uber, Venmo, and Meta’s Instagram, which use specific 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.