• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, October 3, 2019

Class-action cases, while common in the UK, do not occur at such great scale in the UK. Until now.

A Court of Appeal has overruled a previous High Court ruling that the "Google You Owe Us" class action could not proceed because the claimants had not shown any substantial loss through what they allege was a Google workaround used to obtain data from iPhone users between 2011 and 2012.

According to the BBC, this data included gender, sexuality, finance and health information that users had not given consent to share.

Yesterday the Court of Appeal effectively said that having personal data obtained and then processed by a third party without permission counts as a loss in the eyes of the law, and that a previous ruling was wrong.

It should be pointed out that the types of data the BBC points to as being taken are all sensitive categories that have since been picked out by GDPR for special protection. In other words, this was not just any old data -- this was highly personal information.

Google is, as one would expect, appealing against the decision by the Court of Appeal claiming the case has "no merit" and deals with an issue that was corrected a decade ago. 

What it doesn't mention is that a decade ago it was fined GBP18m in the US for this same misuse of data, and so it is hard to see how a case in the UK could be baseless.

Interestingly, as the allegation pre-dates GDPR, the maximum fine available via the ICO would be up to GBP500,000 rather than today's 4% of global revenue.

This probably explains why Google You Owe Us is going for damages rather than simply referring the case to the ICO.

It is impossible to predict whether the court case will happen, although yesterday's decision makes it likely by stating that in law, loss of data equates to a real loss covered by the courts.

City A.M. has been crunching the number and reckons there are 4m claimants who could each get GBP750 each. That equates to an overall bill of GBP3bn.

This would put it up there -- and in fact, right in between -- its anti-competition fines over search and Android.

Google had hoped this case had gone away, but yesterday shows it has a GBP3bn potential headache coming its way for processing data owners had not given permission for.

Whether it was an inadvertent glitch that was corrected when detected or a cynical ploy to work around Safari's privacy protections could well now be a question that a judge will have to answer -- and that could be a very expensive outcome for Google.