Security News > 2021 > April > Billions in data protection lawsuits rides on Google's last-ditch UK Supreme Court defence for Safari Workaround sueball
Google has urged the UK's Supreme Court to throw out a £3bn lawsuit brought by an ex-Which director over secretly planted tracking cookies on devices running Safari, on the grounds that local law doesn't allow for opt-out class action lawsuits.
The case, being heard over two days this week in the Supreme Court, the final court of appeal in Britain for civil cases, has huge implications for legal businesses and investors as well as data protection law.
Lloyd fronts a campaign called Google You Owe Us. He seeks somewhere between £1.5bn and £3bn from Google in damages for breach of statutory duty - but before that can be argued about, he needs legal permission to serve the case on Google LLC in the US. The High Court refused that permission in 2018; the Court of Appeal overruled it a year later and said yes; and now Google wants a return to the status quo from the Supreme Court.
Antony White QC for Google told the court yesterday: "In our submission it is an important point of reference in this case that under the general law, a claim in tort of breach of statutory duty is not actionable per se; it requires proof of harm."
Lady Arden, one of the Supreme Court judges, trenchantly observed yesterday: "You can't just pull out one strand and say 'no harm'. You also have to look at the responsibility of the data holder, whether its actions were proportional or not."
If the Supreme Court gives permission for the case to go ahead, Google will have to defend its sneaky implanting of tracking cookies with reference to section 13 of the Data Protection Act 1998, which was in force when the badness occurred.