Google Will Face Users in Court over Commingled Data

In what the judge termed a "close call," Google lost a battle Monday to dismiss a privacy lawsuit that accuses the search giant of commingling user data and then sharing the information with marketers.

Google will have to go to court against Android users who are pressing breach of contract and fraud claims, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judge Paul Grewal in San Jose, Calif., rejected Google's bid to dismiss the lawsuit on Monday night.

"Like Rocky rising from Apollo's uppercut in the 14th round, plaintiffs' complaint has sustained much damage but just manages to stand," Grewal wrote in a 28-page decision, alluding to the "Rocky Balboa" film series starring Sylvester Stallone.

Neither Mountain View, Calif.-based Google nor Mark Gardy and Joseph Sabella, lawyers for the plaintiffs, responded immediately to requests for comments from Reuters.

The lawsuit stems from Google's platform shift in March 2012 that changed privacy policies for many Google products, clumping user data together and essentially merging their Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps accounts.

Users have criticized the change, saying privacy policies were thrown out without their consent and their personal information was jeopardized.

Google is simultaneously working to close an antitrust settlement in Europe, where the company's rivals "continue to have serious concerns" that the settlement terms are insufficient, Bloomberg News reported. The European Union won't resolve the case until September; Google may need to add extra concessions to appease regulators before then.

The tech giant is also attempting to take down thousands of links after an EU ruling said that people have the "right to be forgotten." Google recently called for the help of an advisory council to discover the best way to fulfill the takedown requests.  

"It's a huge task as we've had over 70,000 take-down requests covering 250,000 webpages since May," Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, wrote in an op-ed that was recently published in several European newspapers.