• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, July 10, 2017

Attorneys general in 11 states are urging an appellate court to scrap Google's $5.5 million settlement of a class-action stemming from allegations that it circumvented Safari's privacy settings.

The officials argue the agreement should be rejected on the grounds that it calls for the settlement money to go to nonprofits, as opposed to people who allegedly were affected by the alleged privacy breach.

"A settlement cannot be in the class’s best interest ... where, as here, it generates millions of distributable settlement dollars (and includes a release of millions of claims) yet the class languishes with no direct compensation," the attorneys general argue in a friend-of-the-court brief filed last week with the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.

The law enforcement officials are siding with class-action activist Theodore Frank, who recently urged the 3rd Circuit to vacate the settlement. Attorneys general from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Wisconsin joined in the brief.

The deal, approved earlier this year by U.S. District Court Judge Sue Robinson in Delaware, requires Google to donate more than $3 million to six schools and nonprofits: Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Center for Democracy & Technology, Public Counsel, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford University. Those groups must agree to use the money for projects related to online privacy. The lawyers who brought the case will receive $1.925 million, but individual Web users won't receive anything.

The litigation stemmed from Google's involvement in the "Safari hack," a privacy scandal that came to light in 2012 when researcher Jonathan Mayer published a report stating that Google (and other companies) circumvented Safari's privacy settings and set tracking cookies. Google was then able to target ads to those users based on their Web-browsing activity.

Google confirmed Mayer's report when it came out, and said it had stopped tracking Safari users or would soon do so. News of the hack also resulted in charges by the Federal Trade Commission and other officials. Google ultimately agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle with the FTC, and an additional $17 million to settle with a group of state attorneys general.

The attorneys general argue that the settlement fund could have been distributed directly to Safari users who were affected by the hack.

"Distribution here is feasible," the attorneys general write. "Class members can be identified through reasonable effort and a claims-made process crafted that will almost certainly ensure distributions that are sufficiently large to make individual distributions economically viable."

They add that other companies -- including Facebook -- have entered into settlement agreements that involved compensating users directly. In Facebook's case, the company settled a lawsuit over its sponsored stories program -- which involved featuring users' names and images in ads shown to their friends -- by paying $15 each to around 600,000 users.