Google Attempts To Escape Massive User Data Lawsuit

Google is trying to get out of a massive lawsuit from consumers who allege that the company is illegally spying on them through their Google Home devices. But the company suffered a serious setback recently when a judge refused to force the plaintiffs into arbitration. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Google's trying to get out of a massive lawsuit from consumers who allege that the company is illegally spying on 'em through their Google Home devices. But the company suffered a serious setback when a judge refused to force the plaintiffs into arbitration. Look, how many times have we talked about this? The Roomba, all of these access points that social media has, is there any question in your mind, if you go home and you tell your wife, you know, I really want a new Chevrolet, that you'll be covered up with Chevrolet ads within five minutes. You can't look at that and say, there's not a problem here. People are listening. And then that material can be sold to other sources. It's just that one conversation. Just the edge of that conversation can be sold to thousands of different places, both conmen and straight business people. But it's just gotta be stopped.

Right. And sometimes it is harmless. Like you say, if I start talking about Chevrolet, I'm gonna get ads on my social media, but also a week or two down the road, I'm gonna get a flyer from my local Chevrolet dealer because they buy that data and okay, that's annoying, but it's harmless to a degree. But what happened in this Google case, and this is why the judge told Google, you're not escaping trial. This case was being kind of litigated for four years. Four years Google was letting this happen. They were having hearings, filing motions.

Even after it happened. Nothing changed though. Even after the lawsuit. But go ahead.

And so Google finally, after four years, they say, hey judge, they can't even sue us because we gotta go to arbitration because that was part of the agreement. And the judge essentially laughed it out of court saying, you've had four years, you've wasted your money, you've wasted their money, you've wasted these lawyers' time, now telling us that we're going to arbitration. Hell no, you're gonna take this to trial. And I will say, right now, the plaintiffs do have an uphill battle.

It's totally an uphill battle.

Because you gotta prove that Google's devices were listening to you.

Correct.

And that Google knew it and did nothing about it. You gotta prove the intent.

The new norm, as you know, I handle cases bigger than that and of course, the new norm is to destroy all, if you have documents, you can prove intent. You can, just the indicia, you put the documents together, the emails, the whatever took place in private meetings. And you have plenty of information to show that yes, they had a plan. Yes, they knew they were gonna make money by getting that information and selling it to somebody else. The problem is that now the whole idea is destroy documents. They're destroying documents as quickly as they generate 'em right now. There's some companies that if I email you and I say, look, we got a problem in Toledo, something's killing, our company's killing people in Toledo, that will be gone in a nanosecond. Okay. So they've got it down to whole science. But when I first started doing these huge cases all the way back to tobacco, actually asbestos, we could tell what the company was doing by looking at their emails and looking at, but they've just gotten to the point to where it's automatic destruction, to prove the kind of intent you're talking about is difficult.

Yeah, absolutely. Especially for a company like Google that obviously is very tech savvy. So they don't have to waste a lot of time. So unfortunately, again, for these plaintiffs.