Google wins in privacy class action lawsuit in the U.S., court dismisses demands for billions of dollars in additional penalties.

On Friday local time, Google persuaded a federal judge in San Francisco to reject a request for over $2 billion in penalties from consumers against the company for collecting their data after users had closed their core privacy settings. Chief Judge of the US District Court, Richard Seeborg, rejected the request, which sought to compel Google to return $23.6 billion in alleged illegally obtained profits and to stop some of its advertising-related data processing activities. Earlier, a jury in September ruled that Google should bear legal responsibility for secretly collecting app activity data from millions of users even after they had disabled tracking. Google has not yet responded to requests for comment, and the plaintiffs chief lawyer has also not responded.