Google Spends Millions on Legal Settlements
Google has recently settled legal cases related to its services, with Alphabet Inc.'s unit to spend millions on settlement deals.
In the The case Heath v. Google Inc., 15-cv-01824, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose), Google agreed to pay $11 million to end a lawsuit accusing the internet giant of discriminating against older job applicants. The deal amounts to an average payout of more than $35,000 for 227 people who joined the class action.
The settlement also calls for Google to train employees and managers about age bias, to create a committee focused on age diversity in recruiting and to ensure that complaints are adequately investigated.
The case was brought by a woman who claimed she was interviewed by Google four times over seven years and was never offered employment despite her “highly pertinent qualifications and programming experience” because of her age.
Google denied the allegations, saying that Fillekes and other job seekers she cited as examples didn’t demonstrate the technical aptitude required for the job, even though they were found by staff interviewers to be “Googley” enough to be a good fit for the company.
In a separate reported by Bloomberg, YouTube reportedly reached a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission resolving allegations that the company violated rules about collecting data on and advertising to children.
The settlement resolves a probe into whether the Google video service broke the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which makes it illegal to collect information on minors and disclose it to others without parental permission. A group of activists last year asked the FTC to look into the matter.
YouTube has been facing criticism about content for children. The company introduced a kids app in 2015, but older children tend to watch the main site.
Last year, a coalition of more than 20 child advocacy and privacy groups filed a complaint with the FTC, alleging YouTube knowingly collected data on and pushed ads to children younger than 13.
Last but not least, Google agreed to pay $13 million to end long-running litigation over claims that it violated a U.S. wiretapping law when vehicles used for its Street View mapping project captured data from private Wi-Fi networks.
The settlement agreement filed Friday in San Francisco federal court would close the books on a scandal that was touched off by trucks used by Google for its Street View mapping project. Cars and trucks scooped up emails, passwords and other personal information from unencrypted household Wi-Fi networks belonging to tens of millions of people all over the world.
The accord still requires approval of a San Francisco judge. But under the settlement, proposed Friday, the owners of the Wi-Fi networks whose information was captured by Google won’t get individual payouts, except for about 20 plaintiffs who filed the complaint as a class action.
Also, Google will destroy all the data it still possesses and commit to teaching people how to protect their privacy on the internet.
The amount Google is offering is less than one sixth the net income the Alphabet Inc. unit generates on average in a single day.