Google is trying to get out of a massive lawsuit from consumers who allege that the company is illegally spying on them through their Google Home devices. But the company suffered a serious setback recently when a judge refused to force the plaintiffs into arbitration. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Google’s trying to get out of a massive lawsuit from consumers who allege that the company is illegally spying on ’em through their Google Home devices. But the company suffered a serious setback when a judge refused to force the plaintiffs into arbitration. Look, how many times have we talked about this? The Roomba, all of these access points that social media has, is there any question in your mind, if you go home and you tell your wife, you know, I really want a new Chevrolet, that you’ll be covered up with Chevrolet ads within five minutes. You can’t look at that and say, there’s not a problem here. People are listening. And then that material can be sold to other sources. It’s just that one conversation. Just the edge of that conversation can be sold to thousands of different places, both conmen and straight business people. But it’s just gotta be stopped.
Farron Cousins: Right. And sometimes it is harmless. Like you say, if I start talking about Chevrolet, I’m gonna get ads on my social media, but also a week or two down the road, I’m gonna get a flyer from my local Chevrolet dealer because they buy that data and okay, that’s annoying, but it’s harmless to a degree. But what happened in this Google case, and this is why the judge told Google, you’re not escaping trial. This case was being kind of litigated for four years. Four years Google was letting this happen. They were having hearings, filing motions.
Mike Papantonio: Even after it happened. Nothing changed though. Even after the lawsuit. But go ahead.
Farron Cousins: And so Google finally, after four years, they say, hey judge, they can’t even sue us because we gotta go to arbitration because that was part of the agreement. And the judge essentially laughed it out of court saying, you’ve had four years, you’ve wasted your money, you’ve wasted their money, you’ve wasted these lawyers’ time, now telling us that we’re going to arbitration. Hell no, you’re gonna take this to trial. And I will say, right now, the plaintiffs do have an uphill battle.
Mike Papantonio: It’s totally an uphill battle.
Farron Cousins: Because you gotta prove that Google’s devices were listening to you.
Mike Papantonio: Correct.
Farron Cousins: And that Google knew it and did nothing about it. You gotta prove the intent.
Mike Papantonio: The new norm, as you know, I handle cases bigger than that and of course, the new norm is to destroy all, if you have documents, you can prove intent. You can, just the indicia, you put the documents together, the emails, the whatever took place in private meetings. And you have plenty of information to show that yes, they had a plan. Yes, they knew they were gonna make money by getting that information and selling it to somebody else. The problem is that now the whole idea is destroy documents. They’re destroying documents as quickly as they generate ’em right now. There’s some companies that if I email you and I say, look, we got a problem in Toledo, something’s killing, our company’s killing people in Toledo, that will be gone in a nanosecond. Okay. So they’ve got it down to whole science. But when I first started doing these huge cases all the way back to tobacco, actually asbestos, we could tell what the company was doing by looking at their emails and looking at, but they’ve just gotten to the point to where it’s automatic destruction, to prove the kind of intent you’re talking about is difficult.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. Especially for a company like Google that obviously is very tech savvy. So they don’t have to waste a lot of time. So unfortunately, again, for these plaintiffs, it doesn’t matter how good your lawyers are, and they do have some good lawyers on this case.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, they do.
Farron Cousins: It’s just the fact that Google is not necessarily sloppy. So, I don’t think they’re gonna leave these kind of things lying around with memos printed out saying, hey, we’re spying on people and that’s hilarious.
Mike Papantonio: One place you get a, that’s interesting, most of the time I get my information from third parties. Okay. They may be a subcontractor, they may be somebody not directly associated with the company who doesn’t destroy it. And that’s where you end up getting these great, great bits of information about what the company was up to. But in this case, the other part of it is arbitration. Wow. What a scam. Huh? What a scam. And we used to talk about this when the first idea of arbitration started. It was driven by the Chamber of Commerce. It was driven by associated industry. Let’s take the courtroom away from the plaintiff. Let’s take the courtroom away from the claimant where a jury never hears this. Instead they bring in these cats that are part of corporate. They’re just raised with corporate, all they know is corporate. And most of the time they have some association with very corporation they’re trying to arbitrate for.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. And if you sign up for a new cell phone service, if you go buy a car, if you basically are signing any kind of contract, buying a house, you’re signing an arbitration agreement. And they’ll quickly say, okay, and here’s your, this arbitration agreement.
Mike Papantonio: And everybody just, yeah, sure.
Farron Cousins: Yep because you’ve already signed 800 things, you’re just ready to get out of there with your car or your new keys. And so you are signing these things. If you’re watching this, you’ve signed one of these and you probably don’t even realize it.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, dozens of them, dozens. Just like going on the internet where have to tag some, you hit a check mark here as arbitration. Judges are starting to say, uh-uh, we’re gonna go to court.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Ring of Fire founder and host of America’s Lawyer, Mike Papantonio has a new book came out this week called, “Suspicious Activity.” Like his other books before it, this book actually deals with real legal cases that Mike Papantonio has handled, but in a fictionalized way. The book follows the character of Nick Deketomis that Papantonio first introduced in his book, “Law and Disorder,” and it carries on the story that began in “Law and Disorder” through “Law and Vengeance,” “Law and Addiction,” “Inhuman Trafficking,” and now “Suspicious Activity.” This book, in particular, deals with the financial institutions that have helped launder money for terrorist organizations, which of course is a topic we have covered extensively here on Ring of Fire. So if you’re a follower of Mike Papantonio’s books, or if this is your first one, you can get your copy of “Suspicious Activity” now. Just go to MikePapantonio.com and place your order. And if you haven’t already, check out Mike’s other books, also available on MikePapantonio.com.
