US District Judge Lucy Koh did not permit the email privacy case lodged against search giant Google to proceed as a class action lawsuit, Bloomberg News reported.
The decision of the San Jose, California court is a big win for Google which is battling allegations that it illegally intercepted, read, scanned and mined email messages from its Gmail platform for its own advertising and user profile building purposes. Had the case been allowed to continue as a group lawsuit, the plaintiffs from Texas, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Florida would have been able to gather their resources together and potentially pressured the search giant to settle. With the decision, individuals who wished to proceed with the case against Google would have to utilize their own resources to do so, the report said.
In the ruling, Koh said the classes of people filing the case against Google were not "sufficiently cohesive." She added that integral to the case is whether the proposed class members gave their agreement to the alleged interceptions Google made regarding their email communications. Based on the evidence presented to her, Koh ruled that "consent must be litigated on an individual, rather than class-wide basis," the report said.
The lawyer for the plaintiffs, Sean Rommel, had said in a filing that the case deserved to be given the class treatment since those who were subject to email scanning shared the "uniform nature" of how Google got data from emails as well as Google's "uniform disclosures" regarding how it treats confidential information, the report said.
Bloomberg News quoted Rommel as saying in the hearing, "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."
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