Yesterday, US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California declared that a single group case over privacy concerns about Google's illegal screening of emails will not be allowed to proceed as a class-action suit. Bloomberg said that this would mean that plaintiffs who are seeking legal action against the search engine company would need to use their own financial resources to seek claims.
According to Koh, the deciding factor to her rejection on allowing the case to gain group status was the question whether the class members consented to the alleged email screenings by Google. She said in her ruling that based on the initial evidence, the consent should be litigated on a per individual basis to prove the arguments on each party.
Bloomberg said the case claimed that Google read and mined data from the email messages of users of the company's Gmail service. Yesterday, legal experts, which include Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Hensler, were quoted in court that although the plaintiffs had faced difficulty in coming together for the lawsuit, the legal action against Google cole become the largest class-action lawsuit in history. It has been said that the amount at stake if Google has been convicted of violations of the federal wiretap law should the court stand by to the complainants' claims that every Gmail user is eligible for $100 in damages per day. Koh had said that the proposed group of people named as complainants were not found to be sufficiently cohesive.
Sean Rommel, a lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the case, had said in a filing that the case was suited perfectly for class treatment as everyone who had been affected with the email scanning had similarities.
"This is no different than, I would assert, a shareholder case where somebody is saying yes, I bought shares within the class period and here's my share. You have to compare it to the company records to see the date when they bought it, to see that they are actually a shareholder," Rommel argued to Koh.
Rommel and Google representatives have not responded to Bloomberg's requests for comment.
