The representative action was brought by campaign group ‘Google You Owe Us’, led by Richard Lloyd, the former executive director of Which? Magazine. Lloyd was applying to serve proceedings on Google in the U.S., alleging that Google breached the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998 through its “Safari Workaround”.
Following the U.K. High Court’s decision in Vidal-Hall v. Google, there are clear arguments to be made that the Safari Workaround breached the Act by collecting private data from individuals using Apple’s Safari browser on iPhones, without their knowledge or consent. However, the Lloyd decision makes clear that potential claimants still have a number of hurdles to overcome before they will succeed in recovering damages from Google.
