A California federal judge signed off on Google’s Real-Time Bidding (“RTB”) settlement but called the value “by no means excellent” and slashed attorney’s fees by more than 83%.

Background on the Case

Filed in 2021, the consolidated class action accused Google of sharing and selling users’ personal information – including demographics, interests, IP addresses, and browsing behavior – through its Real-Time Bidding (RTB) ad auction system, billions of times per day, without users’ knowledge or consent. The class covers at minimum 169 million active U.S. Google account holders, and potentially more than 200 million.

After four and a half years of litigation (including discovery battles, class certification efforts, and multiple appeals), the case settled. The settlement was presented to the U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California for final approval in September 2025. 

What Google Agreed To

Under the settlement, Google agreed to:

• Create a new "RTB Control" tool that allows users to limit how their personal data — including encrypted user IDs and IP addresses — is shared in real-time ad auctions.
• Send an email notification to all active U.S. Google account holders about the new control.
• Publish dedicated disclosures about its RTB advertising practices.

What Google did not agree to: any monetary payment to class members. Named plaintiffs received modest service awards of $15,000 each, but the roughly 169–200 million class members received no cash. Importantly, class members retain the right to pursue damages in future litigation.

The Judge Approved It — With Reservations

Judge Gonzalez Rogers granted final approval on March 26, 2026, but she was pointed in her assessment. Opening the hearing, she told both sides: "Nothing in this case has ever been simple. It is hard for me to understand how plaintiffs in this action can argue this is a complete win. It is not."

Her core concern: the RTB Control is an opt-in feature. Users who never discover the setting — or don't bother — receive no protection at all. Google's RTB system continues unchanged for most of its user base. The judge also noted she had offered plaintiffs' attorneys the option to wait and base their fee request on the actual number of users who activate the control. They declined, preferring immediate payment.

She was equally critical of Google for making the case harder than it needed to be. "You're not an easy defendant to fight against," she told Google's counsel. "You fight against everything."

Her verdict on the deal overall: the settlement is "adequate, but by no means excellent."

The Fee Slash: From $128M to $21.8M

Class counsel requested $128 million in fees, calling the settlement "trailblazing" and claiming it would generate over $1.4 billion in economic value for users. The judge was unpersuaded on two grounds:

• The $1.4B value estimate was speculative. Because plaintiffs declined the judge's offer to wait for real user adoption data, the court refused to base fees on numbers that couldn't be verified.
• Billing hours were inflated. The court found a significant portion of claimed hours stemmed from plaintiffs' own excessive appeals and discovery motions — including seven lost appeals of the Magistrate Judge's discovery rulings and a failed interlocutory appeal — and reduced them accordingly.

The result: attorneys were awarded $21,856,239 in fees plus $3,488,793 in costs — a reduction of more than 83% from the original request.

The Bigger Picture: Google's Privacy Exposure Isn't Going Away

This settlement is one chapter in a much longer story. Just weeks before the approval order, a new class action - McGrath v. Google LLC - was filed in the same Northern District of California, alleging Google's RTB infrastructure transmitted Americans' browsing data to Pangle (ByteDance), MediaGo (Baidu USA), and Temu, in potential violation of the Bulk Sensitive Data Rule, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and California wiretapping statutes.

Meanwhile, Texas finalized a $1.375 billion settlement with Google in October 2025, covering location tracking, incognito monitoring, and biometric data collection. And in September 2025, a federal jury in San Francisco delivered a $425.7 million verdict against Google for continuing to collect data through Firebase SDK after users disabled tracking.

Each of these cases addresses distinct legal theories and distinct datasets — meaning potential recovery opportunities exist across multiple fronts.

Bottom Line

Judge Gonzalez Rogers approved this settlement, but her message was clear: the value is uncertain, the relief is limited to users who proactively opt in, and class counsel dramatically overstated both the results and their own work.

For class members, this case produced no cash. But it didn't close the door, either — class members retain the right to pursue monetary damages, and a wave of follow-on litigation targeting Google's data practices is already underway.

If you're a potential class member or institutional investor with exposure to Google-related privacy claims, now is the time to make sure you're positioned to file in any future cases that do result in a cash recovery. That's exactly what we're here for.