UK court turns down Google appeal

The UK Court of Appeal has turned down Google’s assertion that users in the country could not sue the company for its activities in the UK.

There were other issues, but that was the key one. For privacy campaigners, it signals the end of immunity against local court action claimed by Google and the other US internet giants against users in the UK and Europe, according to ComputerWeekly.com.

In a much more limited county court action in 2014, Microsoft, Facebook and Google made the same defence – that a UK user could not sue them in a UK court for actions they performed in the UK – in Guildhall Court in London.

According to Microsoft, anyone with a complaint against the firm had to go to Seattle, in the USA, to get it heard. The Guildhall judge had no precedent from a higher court to do anything other than offer the claimant the opportunity of a stay while the case was prepared for a US court. The claimant declined the offer on grounds of cost.

That case was based on privacy and the alleged intrusions in the UK under the US Prism surveillance programme.

Now there is a precedent and all of the internet giants face the same fact: they are liable before the courts of the UK, for their actions in the UK, irrespective of their corporate base or origin.

The case in London against Google, by Judith Vidal-Hall and others, concerns the privacy of people’s internet searches and will now go to a full trial. In its unanimous ruling, the Court of Appeal stated that the claims made by Vidal-Hall and the others “raise serious issues and merit a trial”.

In essence, the claimants against Google say that, using a setting on the Safari programme, Google tracked and collected information on their internet use in 2011 and 2012 without their knowledge.

Google attempted to tell this, the third court hearing, that the users privacy concerns were trivial and unworthy of a hearing. The firm’s response to the defeat was to say that it was “disappointed” with the ruling.

Google has not yet said what it will do. It could appeal to the Supreme Court or could even try the European Court as a last resort. However, if Google got to Europe, it would find the opposition already there, fighting the privacy issue on the basis of a direct referral from the Irish High Court.