Google has agreed to pay $68m to settle a class-action lawsuit over Google Assistant's privacy practices.
This is why they need to be local-only. At least maybe with Apple’s Private Cloid Compute and Google’s Private AI Compute they theoretically won’t have access to your inputs/outputs, but still not as good as fully local.
Everything is legal as long as you pay the fines.
Yeah, 68 million for them is probably comparable to us buying a charms blowpop. 
Fines are almost always just a cost of doing business fees on their internal books.
60 million is crazy compared to 102 billion… I guess this lack of proportionality is because settlements are negotiated. The defendent is never going to go overboard with how much they settle, and I’d imagine that any plaintiff is going to be happy settling with a couple million, if not a couple 10 million.
Whats actually more crazy is that these privacy lawsuits always seem to be settled. Settlements cannot become legal precedents. Google paying out 68 million to the plaintiffs does not legally mean they admit any fault or wrongdoing, so they legally get away scott free in that sense. Refusing to settle and going to trial means more chances for public awareness of (alleged) wrongdoing from the defendent and more legal historical precedents to draw from.
The verdict in trials is not negotiated by the parties but instead based on the decision of the judge/jury. It could be “compensatory” where the amount owed is to compensate for injuries, pain and suffering. But it could also additionally be “punative”. Punative damages are where judges/juries can argue that the amount owed should be proportional to what the defendent makes because they’re meant to deter. Precedents would encourage more lawsuits to go to trial rather than settle.
Does anyone have a list of privacy related lawsuits throughout the decades? I’m really interested if they’re either usually settled or usually gone to trial. I would think the former but I am happy to see otherwise.
Edit: found this