• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 5, 2024

Siding with Google, a federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected Android users' attempt to revive claims that the company wrongly collected information about their app usage.

In an unsigned opinion, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Google “expressly disclosed” in its privacy policy that it tracks people's activity on outside sites and apps that use Google services -- including the Android operating system.

“As a result,” the judges wrote, “plaintiffs have no reasonable expectation of privacy in that data.”

The ruling, handed down by Circuit Judges Bridget Bade, Eric Miller and Lawrence VanDyke, comes in a privacy lawsuit brought in 2021 over the “Android Lockbox” -- a program that allegedly enables Google employees to gather data about users when they interact with non-Google apps.

Android users Marie Hammerling and Kay Jackson, both of Florida, claimed in a class-action complaint that Google's alleged data collection violated various California privacy and consumer protection laws, and the company broke its contract with users.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in the Northern District of California dismissed the complaint in 2022, essentially ruling that even if the allegations were proven true, they wouldn't support a finding that Google violated any privacy standards or consumer protection laws.

Android Lockbox came to public attention in 2020, when The Information reported that Google drew on data about people's use of outside apps, like TikTok, for competitive purposes. Google reportedly only collects the data from users who agree to share their “usage and diagnostics” information with the company. The tech company says in an online support page the company uses that data “to improve products and services, like Google apps and Android devices.”