Verdict Shockwaves: Google’s $425M Privacy Payout and France’s Cookie Crackdown Signal the New Normal

The jury verdict: what happened and why it matters

In San Francisco, a federal jury concluded that Google collected data from millions of users even after they turned off a core tracking setting. The class sought more than $30 billion, but the jury landed on $425.7 million, finding violations on key claims while stopping short of punitive damages. The class period spanned multiple years and covered nearly a hundred million users/devices. Google disputes the interpretation of its controls and has indicated it will appeal, but the practical signal to product teams is immediate: your privacy toggles must do exactly what they say on the tin—and they must do it in a way a lay jury will understand later.

There’s a narrow legal storyline here (consumer protection and state privacy grounds) and a broader governance one. Plaintiffs argued the company profited from data collection at odds with user intent, while Google cited the complexity of settings and improvements over time. Either way, the verdict shows jurors grasp the difference between internal telemetry / “service improvement” and behavioral signals that feed advertising. If your UI claims “off,” you need a defensible, documented, and auditable pathway from the toggle to back-end systems—no shadow collection, no ambiguities, no long-tail services doing what the main app promised not to.

Smaller businesses are finding themselves under litigation from private right of actions from firms like Tauler Smith, Pacific Trial Attorneys, Swigart, and Gutride Safier who are all based out of California. Most of the claims center around California Invasion of Privacy Act violations and are targting everything from Hotjar Session Replay technology, Quantum Metric, Facebooks Meta-Pixel, Linkedin, Adroll, or TikTok. The term DBSDK is also being weaponized in these cases.

The CNIL fine: why Gmail ads and cookies triggered a nine-figure penalty

Across the Atlantic in France, the CNIL dropped a separate hammer: €325 million in fines aimed at two practices. First, Gmail reportedly showed ads as quasi-emails in Promotions and Social tabs without prior consent.

Second, during Google account creation, the flow nudged users toward personalized-ad cookies without equally clear, granular choices—meaning any consent was not “freely given” or “informed.” The CNIL ordered remediation within six months and attached a daily penalty for noncompliance, emphasizing that cookie choices must be transparent and that ad insertions in inboxes are—legally—the same as commercial email requiring opt-in under French rules. The fine also sits within the CNIL’s long-running cookie action plan: guidance in 2019, a series of enforcement actions since, and steadily rising amounts for repeat noncompliance.

Context: this isn’t a one-off—it’s an enforcement slope getting steeper

If you’re feeling déjà vu, you’re not wrong. In 2022, 40 U.S. attorneys general landed a $391.5 million settlement with Google over location tracking disclosures. Earlier, in 2019, the CNIL’s then-record €50 million GDPR fine against Google signaled that “consent” had to be unbundled, granular, and truly voluntary. Fast-forward to 2025 and the figures have scaled up, the theories are more precise, and procedural patience is wearing thin. Together, the U.S. jury verdict and the French enforcement showcase complementary toolkits: private class actions and public administrative penalties—each with the ability to cost hundreds of millions and force product redesigns.

Why this matters to every business (not just Big Tech)

It’s tempting to read nine-figure numbers and think, “That’s for the giants.” Reality check: the same legal principles and patterns govern you. Plaintiffs’ firms look for scale, but regulators routinely enforce against midsize and smaller organizations—especially those with consumer reach, adtech ties, or SaaS integrations. Two forces make 2025 tougher than 2020: (1) lawmakers and regulators have codified what “valid consent,” “clear notice,” and “privacy by default” look like, and (2) forensic and investigative capabilities for cookies, SDKs, and server calls are more mature. An audit today can show—line by line—where your flows diverge from what your banner or settings promise.

Enforcement patterns emerging from these cases

• Settings must be decisive. A toggle that says “off” can’t be undercut by background services or third-party SDKs. Product, analytics, ads, and legal need the same truth map.
• Consent needs parity. “Reject all” must be as easy and prominent as “Accept all,” with granular choices that don’t coerce. Consent for email-like ads is still consent—even in an inbox UI.
• Default-to-minimize. If a function doesn’t strictly require personal data, don’t collect it. Especially for cross-app/website signals, minimize or use on-device/aggregate alternatives.
• Evidence beats intention. You’ll need logs and diagrams proving how signals are suppressed when a user opts out—and proving that vendors downstream respect that choice.
• Remediation timelines shrink. Orders now attach tight deadlines and daily penalties. Design teams should treat privacy fixes like security patches.

A size-agnostic compliance checklist you can ship this quarter

1. Map every signal path. Build a data-flow diagram from UI control → client code → SDKs → network calls → server-side jobs. Label each hop that must stop when a user opts out.
2. Kill the “grey areas.” Document which cookies/IDs are strictly necessary. Everything else goes behind a consent gate with equal Accept/Reject and granular toggles.
3. Fix account-creation flows. No pre-checked ad consent. No dark patterns. Present “generic ads” vs “personalized ads” neutrally with plain language and the same click depth.
4. Align email and in-app ads to consent rules. If an ad looks like an email in a mailbox, treat it as commercial messaging: prior opt-in, easy opt-out, complete identification.
5. Vendor contracts and audits. Insert hard obligations: honor signals, no secondary use, no retention beyond X days, and attestations. Re-run DPIAs for adtech/analytics partners.
6. Telemetry split. Separate security/availability telemetry (often legitimate interest) from marketing/behavioral signals (consent). Don’t blend them.
7. Prove it. Build automated tests that flip user settings and verify outbound calls and cookie sets drop to the minimal set. Keep artifacts for regulators and litigators.
8. Refresh notices. Rewrite cookie banners and privacy notices in plain English. Put the big promises in bold and ensure the code keeps those promises.

Litigation lens: how plaintiffs frame “harm”

For years, privacy suits struggled to quantify harm. The narrative has flipped: plaintiffs now allege concrete economic value in behavioral signals and present expert models that tie those signals to advertising lift. They also pursue statutory damages where available and argue that deceived consent is a consumer-protection violation with real-world consequences. The jury verdict reinforces that credibility and clarity in settings are persuasive—and that complex architectures won’t save a company from a simple story a juror can retell: “I turned it off; they kept collecting.”

Global view: cookie fatigue meets compliance fatigue

In Europe, the ePrivacy and GDPR consent standards are well-worn, and regulators now focus less on “what the banner says” and more on what the code does. In the U.S., sectoral and state laws still vary, but class actions and AG coalitions fill the federal gap. The throughline is convergence: give users a real choice, minimize by default, and don’t disguise ads as messages. Expect more DPAs to copy CNIL’s blend of theory (valid consent), UI/UX critique (design that nudges), and hard timelines. Expect more U.S. juries to translate privacy abstractions into dollar figures.

FAQ for founders, counsel, and PMs

Q1: We don’t run ads—are we still at risk? Yes. Any tracking that isn’t strictly necessary (analytics, A/B tools, pixels) requires a valid legal basis. If consent, it must be truly optional and revocable. If legitimate interest, weigh it carefully and provide an easy opt-out.

Q2: Our consent is handled by a CMP—good enough? A CMP is plumbing, not policy. You’re still responsible for what gets set and called after user choices. Validate that suppression propagates to every SDK and tag.

Q3: We’re U.S.-only—why should we care about CNIL? Many global vendors set defaults that ship everywhere. If your stack includes EU-centric SDKs or shared libraries, misconfigurations can leak into your product. Also, U.S. plaintiffs cite EU enforcement to show norms and feasibility.

Implementation Help

Privacy enforcement isn’t “getting crazier”; it’s getting clearer—and more expensive to ignore. A jury verdict cresting $400M and a regulator fine topping €300M in the same week aren’t coincidences; they’re a forecast. If your toggles lie, if your cookies sneak, or if your inbox ads pretend not to be ads, you’re building a litigation and enforcement pipeline, not a product. We saw this with the Honda Enforcement when their OneTrust Cookie Consent Banner didn’t work and they got hit with a $632,500 fine and thus created a lot of queries around Captain Compliance as an alternative solution.

The fix for privacy violators isn’t exotic: minimize data, honor choices, document the plumbing, and test it weekly or just hire Captain Compliance and let us handle all the updates and let us be responsible for any monetary damages that we will cover and pay because we believe in our product so much we will pay your fine. That approach scales—from a five-person startup to a multinational. If you want a turnkey path for data privacy automation book a demo below with one of our data privacy experts and learn more about hwo we can help.