Judge Shoots Down Google Wallet Class Action Lawsuit

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A woman will have a second chance to remedy issues in her Google Wallet class action lawsuit thanks to a an order supporting motions to dismiss various counts gave her leave to amend.

Alice Svenson alleged breach of contract and violations of the Stored Communications Act based on an experience she had with an Android device. She argues that when she paid using Google Wallet to purchase an app, the company sent her contact information along to the developer which violated her privacy unnecessarily.

However, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman found several issues with her claims, especially regarding the breach of contract because she “ entered into the Google, Google Wallet and Google Play agreements separately from her actual purchase of the App.” As a result, the woman had already accepted the terms which included the possibility of such data transmissions in those contracts prior to the purchase and did not expect any new rights.

In addition, the class action attorneys had asked the judge to review other decisions governed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that had found that if the information was being used to create revenue, then the contract could still be in breach. Judge Freeman noted that the “diminished economic value would depend on the existence of a market for the information,” which the class action lawsuit did not demonstrate in detail.

There were also concerns about the violations of the Stored Communication Act, which protects consumers from having their information transmitted to other parties without their consent. To do so, the “plaintiff must allege that Defendants engaged in unauthorized access of the facility. This they plainly cannot do here, as the facility in question belongs to Defendants.”

A second prong of the SCA revolves around the disclosure of the “contents of a communication” to a third party. However, Judge Freeman noted that the complaint failed in that regard because of precedent estbalishing that there is a difference between a record such as contact information and that Svenson would need to be able to “demonstrate that the alleged disclosure was more than [that].”

She did allow the class action attorneys and the plaintiffs an opportunity to amend the contract on the breach of contract and second SCA violation counts.

The plaintiffs are represented by Kathryn Diemer of Diemer Whitman & Cardosi LLP, and Frank Jablonski, Elizabeth Roberson-Young and Mark Bulgarelli of Progressive Law Group LLC.

The Google Wallet Class Action Lawsuit is Alice Svenson, et al. v. Google Inc., et al., Case No. 13-cv-04080 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

UPDATE: On July 8, 2016, Google argued that Svenson can’t prove that the company acted the same way towards each Class Member and caused each of them uniform harm therefore her claims can’t be brought as a class action lawsuit.