Approximately 1.72 million users received a $2.15 payment from Google to settle the Google+ data breach class-action lawsuit

In 2014, Google’s social networking site Google+ had already died within Google. Since then, the site has ceased to be developed and updated but can still be used.

However, Google later discovered that the platform leaked 500,000 user data from 2015 to March 2018. The reason for the leak was a problem with the API interface provided by Google.

It is worth noting that Google was worried that the publication of the data breach would affect its reputation, so it chose to conceal it and not report it. Google also decided to shut down the website directly.

As a result, Google’s data leakage problem was later known and reported by the media, and then the European Union and US regulators began to initiate data investigations on Google.

What is even more embarrassing is that in subsequent investigations, Google found that the leaked data was incorrect. In fact, all types of private data of up to 52.5 million users were leaked.

This time Google did not dare to continue to conceal the incident and immediately disclosed the incident to the public. After that, some American users sought the support of a lawyer to initiate a class-action lawsuit against Google for compensation.

The users who initiated the class action said that the data breach should be attributed to Google’s lax security program, and to make matters worse, Google still concealed the breach.

This has led to many consumers not knowing that their data has been leaked and even facing identity theft. Obviously, Google has seriously violated the legitimate rights and interests of consumers.

For this reason, the lawyer team initiated a class-action lawsuit against Google for financial compensation on behalf of users. After two years of litigation, Google finally agreed to settle and pay related compensation.

In June 2020, Google agreed to pay a settlement fee of $7.5 million. Of course, half of the settlement fee was paid to lawyers and spent on various administrative expenses.

The final compensation to users is 3.698 million. As of October 2020, 1.72 million users have correctly registered relevant information on the class action website.

Therefore, it is the users who fill in the information who actually get the compensation. These users evenly share the remaining compensation, and eventually, everyone can get $2.15.

If you have registered correctly, you should receive a settlement fee paid by Google at this time. The settlement fee is paid through the PayPal platform and the user will receive an email notification.

When the user receives the email or the notification sent by PayPal, they only need to click the link to confirm. After confirmation, the compensation of $2.15 will be automatically deposited into the PayPal account.

Of course, although this compensation fee is quite small, it is a windfall after all, and Google+ was completely shut down in April 2019 and no more user information can be disclosed.

At present, many users have taken screenshots on Twitter to share the settlement fee they received. However, when the media sought Google’s comment, Google did not respond. It is estimated that they did not want to mention this.

Via: arstechnica