$4.3-billion class action against Google blocked by UK Supreme Court

LONDON, Nov 10 (Reuters) - The UK Supreme Court has blocked a planned 3.2 billion pound ($4.3 billion) British class action against Google over allegations the internet giant unlawfully tracked the personal information of millions of iPhone users.

Britain’s top judges unanimously granted a Google appeal against the country’s first such data privacy case on Wednesday, a move that upsets a string of similar claims waiting in the wings against companies such as Facebook and TikTok. 

The landmark case led by Richard Lloyd, a consumer rights activist and the former director of Which? magazine, sought to extend Britain’s class action regime to include compensation claims for alleged misuse of data - even if there is no obvious financial loss or distress.

Lloyd, backed by a commercial litigation funder, alleged Google secretly took more than 5 million Apple iPhone users’ personal data between 2011 and 2012 by bypassing default privacy settings on Safari browsers to track internet browsing histories, and used this for commercial purposes.