Google Play Class Action Claims Unnecessary Disclosure of Personal Info

Top Class Actions’s website and social media posts use affiliate links. If you make a purchase using such links, we may receive a commission, but it will not result in any additional charges to you. Please review our Affiliate Link Disclosure for more information.

Google Inc. and Google Payment Corporation are facing a class action lawsuit alleging they needlessly shared personal identifying information about Google Play app purchasers with third party vendors.

Plaintiff Adam Gurno of Minnesota filed the Google Play class action lawsuit in the County of Santa Clara, Calif. in September. It was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Oct. 10.

According to the Google class action lawsuit, every time a person purchased an app from the Google Play store, the buyer was required to use Google Wallet and agree to Google Wallet’s Terms of Service as applicable to the app purchase.

When the buyer made the purchase, they provided information that was used in data “packets” that electronically communicated information to Google, the Google class action lawsuit alleges. These packets included electronic-addressing information that allowed communications about the app purchase to be routed to the Google defendants and personal identifying information (PII) about the buyers.

The contract that buyers entered into when making a Google Play purchase allegedly included terms that precluded Google from sharing PII with app vendors, with some exceptions that were documented in the buyer contract.

According to the Google class action lawsuit, the nondisclosure promises about PII are not applicable when Google Play users download free apps from the Google Play store.

“Defendants did not need to share PII with App Vendors,” Gurno says in the Google class action lawsuit. “Defendants nevertheless shared with App Vendors elements of PII that included one or more of the following: identity (name), street address, city, zip code, email address, or telephone number.”

The unnecessary disclosure of buyers’ PII violates the California Unfair Competition Law, the Google Wallet Terms of Service, consumers’ right to privacy under the California constitution, and violates the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, the Google Play class action lawsuit alleges.

Gurno says he originally signed up for Google’s “Checkout” payment processing service, which was replaced by Google Wallet in November 2011. When he signed up for Checkout, Gurno allegedly provided Google with his personal and credit card information and agreed to the Checkout terms of service.

Gurno says he made several app purchases through Google Play, spending a total of $26.37. Google allegedly retained 30 percent of this sum and sent the remaining 70 percent to the third-party app vendors.

“Plaintiff did not agree that his PII could or would be transmitted to the App Vendors’ Google Wallet Accounts,” the Google class action lawsuit says.

According to the Google Play class action lawsuit, Google has stopped the practice of sharing PII with app vendors.

Gurno filed the Google class action lawsuit on behalf of himself and a proposed Class of: “All individuals in the United States who, between March 1, 2012 and April 30, 2014 (the ‘Class Period’), (i) purchased a Paid App on the Google Play Store that cost less than $300, (ii) using a credit or debit card via their Google Wallet account.”

The Google class action lawsuit also seeks certification of a subclass of Class Members who purchased an app from an app vendor that was located in a European Union member state at the time of sale.

Gurno is represented by Kathryn S. Diemer of Diemer & Wei LLP, Adam E. Urbanczyk of Progressive Law Group LLC, and Rafey Balabanian and Nina Eisenberg of Edelson PC.

The Google Play Privacy Class Action Lawsuit is Adam Gurno v. Google Inc., et al., Case No. 5:17-cv-05824-HRL, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.