Google Agrees To Settle Lawsuit Over COVID App Plausibly Exposing Personal Info

Photo 139539048 © Libux77 | Dreamstime.com

After some pushback, Google has agreed to settle a class-action complaint accusing its COVID-19 contact-tracing app of exposing Android users’ private medical information.

MediaPost cites court documents from February 24 detailing that legal representatives of both parties have reached a middle ground after three virtual mediation talks. How much they’ve agreed to settle on isn’t publicly known, however.

Google was sued by California residents Jonathan Diaz and Lewis Bornmann after they came across research from privacy analysis firm AppCensus suggesting that Google’s software, which it developed alongside Apple, stored sensitive medical information in a system log accessible by pre-installed Android apps.

The plaintiffs claimed in their complaint last year that Google had violated a medical information state law, along with their right to privacy under California law.

The tech giant argued then that, even if the research showed that medical information was readable by third parties, it was nothing more than a proof of concept. There was no real evidence of data being exposed by the app to malicious parties, it asserted.

“They don’t allege that any bad actor has gone to the lengths that would be necessary to decipher a user's identity,” said Google, who dismissed the discovery as a mere “textbook case about a hypothetical risk.”

[via MediaPost, cover photo 139539048 © Libux77 | Dreamstime.com]