One really has to hand it to Google.

In a settlement of a class action lawsuit alleging privacy violations brought against the company by customers of its new Buzz networking service, a Northern California District Court awarded sums totaling $2 million to three entities that advance Google’s policy message.

As enumerated in the final ruling issued last week, the settlement awarded $500,000 each to the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and the Berkman Center for Internet Society at Harvard, and a jaw-dropping $1 million to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

None of the $8.5 million in total settlement funds assessed from Google was awarded to the class members who were harmed by the privacy violations and filed the suit in the first place. Lawyers got over $2 million and the balance of the funds went to other organizations, all classified as“internet privacy education organizations”.

The initial settlement announcement, in which Google conceded no wrongdoing and coupled with a promise that the funds would go to better educate consumers about privacy, was itself a laughable outcome given the grievance – that Google automatically posted Gmail users’ most frequently emailed contacts on public Buzz profile pages. The burden always seems to be on someone else, with Google. You are assumed in unless you opt out.

As Molly McHugh rightly put it in a post on Digital Trends after the initial settlement was announced, “the company is ready to put the misunderstanding behind it with the multimillion dollar proposal and promise of further instructions for its users – which has an air of condescension to it, sort of like, ‘I’m sorry you weren’t smart enough to figure this out on your own. I’ll help you next time.’”

But to then award organizations carrying the Google flag on a majority of Internet policy issues adds insult to injury.

So to sum up, Google settled a suit in which individuals felt so strongly the company’s practice violated their privacy they were compelled to sign onto a class action lawsuit, by paying more to entities that are advancing an agenda advantageous to Google.

Pretty slick. Kudos to Google’s lawyers for scheming up yet another way to fund its policy message through front organizations, but does Google still think it’s doing no evil when it settles a lawsuit about harming individual privacy rights in such a self-serving way?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2011 at 10:24 am by Sandra Aistars and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.