Dismissal Sought for Google Wallet Class Action Lawsuit

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A tech giant’s legal team is effectively saying, “second verse, same as the first” as it seeks a federal judge’s dismissal of a putative class action lawsuit that alleges Google unnecessarily violates users’ privacy by sending their contact information to the developer when they use Google Wallet to make a purchase.

The first amended complaint came after U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman dismissed the initial Google Wallet class action lawsuit. She paid particular attention to the lack of economic injury suffered by lead plaintiff Alice Svenson as well as the fact that she had agreed the terms of the “Google, Google Wallet and Google Play agreements separately from her actual purchase of the [Google Wallet] app.”

Now, Google says that Svenson has failed to remediate the same flaws. According to Google, the information it transferred to app developers is still “record information” that is not generally dangerous, like name and address that are not governed by a federal statute protecting consumers from unreasonable disclosures of their information.

Google argues that Svenson also fails to distinguish the multitude of cases that make clear that her name, email address, city, state, zip or phone number (her “Contact Information”) is considered “record” information, not the contents of communications, under the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”). Google also wrote in the motion to dismiss the Google Wallet class action lawsuit that while Svenson alleged that she lost the value of that personal information, she and her class action attorneys failed to establish exactly where she would have sold it.

Finally, the defense team argued that the Google Wallet class action lawsuit fails because the first amended complaint alleges Svenson paid Google “in exchange for … privacy protections, and they retained a percentage of that.” As noted above, the contract provided that such data might be disclosed and Google did not retain any money that Svenson paid to others, totaling $1.77.

Google notes that while there are many changes to the Google Wallet class action lawsuit, the changes merely include language designed to address the issues Judge Freeman had, rather than make substantive modifications to rectify the problems. The motion seeking dismissal with prejudice notes that “it weighs against the plausibility of a complaint if the allegations in a successive pleading appear contradictory or geared toward avoiding dismissal in light of the court’s prior orders.”

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.