A federal judge in San Jose on October 13, 2026 granted final approval to Google's $68 million settlement of a seven-year-old class action alleging that Google Assistant devices recorded people without their consent, awarding class counsel the full one-third fee they requested while cutting the four named plaintiffs' service awards in half and overruling all seven objections.

In Short

A judge signed off on the deal in which Google pays $68 million to people who bought Google devices or whose conversations Google Assistant recorded by mistake. About 1.49 million people filed claims, and buyers are expected to get roughly $18 to $56 each while people in the privacy group get about $2 to $10. The lawyers get about $22.7 million plus $1 million in costs, and the people who led the lawsuit get $5,000 each instead of the $10,000 they asked for.

The order

Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the US District Court for the Northern District of California signed the 31-page order in Kumandan, et al. v. Google LLC, et al., case 5:19-cv-04286-BLF, on October 13, 2026. It was filed as Document 584. The order resolves the plaintiffs' motion for final approval (ECF No. 567), class counsel's motion for attorneys' fees, expenses and service awards (ECF No. 566), and seven objections filed by class members.

The result, in the order's own words: "(1) the Motion for Final Approval of the Class Action Settlement is GRANTED; (2) the Motion for Attorney's Fees, Expenses, and Service Awards is GRANTED IN PART AND DENIED IN PART, and (3) the objections are OVERRULED."

The court held its fairness hearing on October 1, 2026. Class counsel must now submit a proposed judgment along with the list of class members who opted out. Until that judgment is entered, no money moves.

PPC Land reported on the settlement terms on January 28, 2026, when the parties first asked the court for preliminary approval. This order adds the numbers that only exist after a notice campaign has run: how many people were reached, how many claimed, how many opted out, and how the judge treated the fee request.

What the case was about

The litigation began in July 2019, when Asif Kumandan, Melissa Spurr and Spurr's minor child filed suit. Two other complaints followed, filed by Lourdes Galvan and Eleeanna Galvan in 2019 and by Edward Brekhus and Jon Hernandez in August 2020, and the three cases were consolidated. Brekhus and Hernandez later dropped their claims.

The plaintiffs alleged that Google Assistant-enabled devices, which the order abbreviates as GAEDs, recorded and transmitted sound when nobody had said "Hey Google" or pressed a button. According to the order, the plaintiffs alleged that the devices "could activate in other circumstances, including to collect data to improve the speech recognition abilities of GAEDs and based on 'alarm events' like the sound of breaking glass or a smoke alarm." They also alleged that recordings made without consent were sent "to unauthorized third-party contractors."

The complaint was amended four times and survived three rounds of motions to dismiss. Eight claims remained in the end, among them the federal Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, Section 632 of the California Penal Code, intrusion upon seclusion, breach of contract and California's Unfair Competition Law. Section 632 is the confidential-communications provision of California's all-party consent regime.

Google denies wrongdoing. It moved for summary judgment in February 2025, arguing that the purchaser class could not prove most elements of its claims, and a trial had been set for September 2025. The settlement overtook both.

Two classes, one certified in litigation

The order is candid about how uneven the two settlement classes were in litigation strength. In July 2022 the plaintiffs sought certification of three classes. The court certified only the Purchaser Class, allowing it to proceed on breach of contract and Unfair Competition Law claims. It declined to certify a Privacy Class of opted-in users with recordings from a "False Accept" and an SCA Class of users whose recordings were shared with a human reviewer.

The settlement classes, as conditionally defined and now finally certified, are:

  • Purchaser Settlement Class: all users who purchased a Google-made device between May 18, 2016 and the date of preliminary approval.
  • Privacy Settlement Class: all users of Google Assistant, and members of their households, during that period "whose communications were recorded or otherwise obtained by Google Assistant as a result of a False Accept or whose communications were recorded or otherwise obtained by Google Assistant and disclosed to any third-party review vendor."

Certifying a settlement class that had been refused as a litigation class is permitted, the court explained, because "[t]he criteria for class certification are applied differently in litigation classes and settlement classes." The judge added that the earlier denial "was based on factual issues regarding Plaintiffs' class membership that are no longer at issue."

Kumandan is the class representative for the purchasers. Kumandan, Melissa Spurr, Lourdes Galvan and Eleeanna Galvan represent the privacy class.

How the $68 million is valued

The order's adequacy analysis rests on damages figures submitted by class counsel. If the purchaser class had won at trial and survived appeals, classwide damages would have ranged from about $120 million, based on nominal damages of $1.00 per Google-made device, to $448.8 million, based on a price premium of $3.74 per device. On that basis the $68 million settlement represents "approximately 15.15% to 56.67% of the maximum recoverable damages," which the court called "an exceptional outcome given the risks."

Both ends of that range imply the same base. Dividing $120 million by $1.00 and $448.8 million by $3.74 each gives 120 million devices, a figure PPC Land derived from the order's numbers; the order itself does not state a device count. Google, according to the plaintiffs' motion quoted in the order, "vehemently disputes Class Counsel's estimate of recoverable damages and the assumptions on which it is based, including Class Counsel's estimate of the number of devices sold."

The privacy class faced longer odds. To recover anything comparable, it would have had to win an appeal of the certification denial, survive pre-trial and post-trial motions, win at trial and hold the verdict on appeal.

Points, caps and expected payouts

The fund is distributed by points. A purchaser earns four points per Google-made device, capped at three devices, for a maximum of 12. A privacy class member receives one point per claim. Someone in both classes can reach 13 points.

According to class counsel's estimates cited in the order, the settlement delivers approximately $18 to $56 to each purchaser and approximately $2 to $10 to each privacy class member. The judge found the gap equitable, because the purchaser class "was permitted to proceed on a classwide basis while the Privacy Class was not."

The fund is non-reversionary. None of it returns to Google. Money left after the first distribution is redistributed, and only when a further round would cost more than it pays out does the remainder go to a cy pres recipient, which the court must separately approve.

The notice campaign in numbers

The claims administrator, A.B. Data, sent email notices to 173,814,291 valid addresses with a 98.76% delivery rate, followed two months later by a reminder to every address that had not yet produced a claim or an exclusion request. A news release was picked up by 426 online publications and viewed more than 4,400 times. The settlement website recorded approximately 5,193,744 visits by 1,959,763 unique users. A.B. Data answered more than 3,729 emails, and the toll-free line took more than 2,817 calls.

According to A.B. Data's declaration, "The Notice Plan reached more than 75.2% of the target audience." That sits inside the 70 to 95% reach range in the Federal Judicial Center's checklist, the order notes.

Claims and opt-outs

As of September 17, 2026, A.B. Data had received more than 1.49 million timely claims and more than 40,000 late claims, which it has discretion to accept. As of September 30, 2026, it had received 217 valid and timely exclusion requests, an opt-out rate the court put at "less than 0.015%."

Set against the emailed population, 1.49 million timely claims is a claims rate of roughly 0.86%, by PPC Land's calculation. In January, A.B. Data estimated a claims rate of 1 to 2%, according to the earlier PPC Land report. The comparison is imprecise. The emailed population is not the class, a point class counsel pressed in response to one objector: the "171 million delivered Notices" is "simply the notice population of those who potentially could be Settlement Class Members." Late claims, if accepted, would add a little under three percent to the timely total.

Fees: one-third approved, partner rates cut

Class counsel asked for one-third of the fund, $22,666,666.70, which is above the Ninth Circuit's 25% benchmark. Judge Freeman approved the full amount after working through the factors from Vizcaino v. Microsoft: the result achieved, the risk of the litigation, the skill required, and awards in comparable cases.

On risk, the order notes that counsel "prosecuted this case for more than six years on contingency, fronting out-of-pocket costs and devoting over 20,000 attorney and staff hours." It describes the privacy claims as "not entirely novel, though they were applied to a novel voice-assistant technology and thus exemplify unsettled questions of law." Google's pending summary judgment motion, its efforts to move purchasers into arbitration, and the approaching trial added to the risk.

The discovery record listed in the order includes 57 requests for production, 26 interrogatories, 82 requests for admission, more than 50 meet and confers, and two expert reports. The fee chart shows over 2,950 hours spent on class certification alone.

As comparators, the court cited Barrett v. Apple Inc., where 33.33% of a $35 million settlement was awarded in 2025, and In re TikTok, Inc., Consumer Privacy Litigation, where 33% of $92 million was awarded in 2022.

The $3,000 hourly rate

The lodestar cross-check is where the judge intervened. Class counsel from four firms, Lowey Dannenberg, Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law, the Lexington Law Group and the Wood Law Firm, reported 20,371.6 hours and a lodestar of $22,477,337.50, excluding all time after June 30, 2026.

David Scott of Scott+Scott requested a billing rate of $3,000 an hour. "That is patently unreasonable," the order states. The highest rate in any case his declaration cited was $1,975, and the highest awarded within the Northern District of California was $1,545, in Barrett v. Apple. "It is not unusual for named partners to charge more than other partners. And the Court is cognizant that rates increase year to year. But not to $3,000 an hour," the judge wrote, noting that both David Scott and Daryl Scott had billed only to later stages of the case.

The court reduced David Scott's rate to $1,600 and Daryl Scott's from $1,960 to $1,600. It also cut Geoffrey Horn and Vincent Briganti of Lowey Dannenberg from $1,795 to $1,600 each. Together the cuts removed $217,800 from the lodestar.

None of this changed the fee. The cross-check exists to test whether a percentage award produces an outsized multiplier, and here the multiplier was close to one either way. The order says the reduced lodestar "yields a ratio of 1.009, which is not materially different from the original cross-check ratio."

That figure does not match the arithmetic. Reducing the lodestar should raise the ratio, not lower it. By PPC Land's calculation, $22,666,666.70 divided by the reduced lodestar of $22,259,537.50 gives about 1.018, while 1.009 is roughly the ratio before the reductions. Elsewhere the order repeats that the cross-check after modifications yielded 1.01. At either value the multiplier remains close to one, so the discrepancy does not affect the outcome, but it is the court's own figure that is inconsistent. Across the 20,371.6 hours reported, the approved fee works out to roughly $1,113 an hour, again by PPC Land's calculation.

Expenses and service awards

The court approved litigation expenses of $1,021,738.40 in full, covering experts, mediation, electronic discovery and document hosting, notice to the certified purchaser class, transcripts, research and travel.

Service awards were the one request the court cut. Each of the four class representatives sought $10,000. The judge rejected class counsel's framing that the awards were "less than 0.06%" of the fund, writing that the relevant comparison is with what other class members receive. At the $56 high end, "a Class Representative would receive more than 178 times that of a Purchaser Class member." The court found $10,000 awards would amount to "inequitable treatment of class members" and granted $5,000 each, citing the large class and "the relatively modest recovery figure on an individual basis." The order notes that Kumandan was deposed for more than seven hours and Lourdes Galvan for more than five.

What the deductions add up to

Fees, expenses and service awards together total $23,708,405.10, or about 34.9% of the fund, by PPC Land's calculation. That leaves roughly $44.3 million before notice and administration costs. The order does not state those costs; the January filings estimated them at about $1.7 million, which would bring the amount available for claimants to around $42.6 million. Neither figure appears in the final approval order, so both are estimates.

The seven objections

Judge Freeman overruled every objection, though she called two of them "well taken" and used them to justify her own scrutiny of the fee chart.

Thomas raised general grievances about data privacy and intellectual property without a specific objection to the settlement.

Kirkley, a privacy class member, argued that statutory damages would have been higher at trial, that the settlement was part of "a recurring pattern of disclosure-heavy" and "devalued" settlements, and that the fees raised the warning signs identified in the Ninth Circuit's Bluetooth decision. The court answered that the privacy class had no certified path to statutory recovery, and that the Bluetooth signs were absent: there is no "clear sailing" agreement, since Google did not agree to refrain from opposing the fee, there is no reverter of unawarded fees to Google, and counsel receive substantially less than the classes. The order refers to "any injunctive relief the settlement agreement endows upon the classes" but does not describe it.

Cook did not object to the settlement but to the fees, expenses and service awards, noting that "every dollar awarded in fees, expenses, or service awards is a dollar that is unavailable for distribution to the Settlement Class." The judge pointed to the service award cut and the rate reductions.

Smith filed the most detailed objection. He argued that the $3.74 price premium, built on a willingness-to-pay measure, undervalued the claims, and that a willingness-to-accept measure would have produced a higher figure. The court found that argument came "with no expert support" and did not grapple with Google's challenges to the damages model. Smith also attacked the three-device cap, which class counsel said reflects the expected lifetime of Google devices; the court noted that Lopez v. Apple used a five-device cap and that owners of more devices could have opted out. His challenge to the serial number requirement failed as well. Class counsel told the court that "the modern claims process is fraught with automated 'bot' operations" that sign false claim forms, and the judge treated serial numbers, proof of purchase and the perjury attestation as layers of one fraud defense. "Isolating a particular fraud-prevention measure and arguing that it is not important is unavailing," the order states.

Abbatecola wrote one line: "I object to the Fee Application presented by these attorneys." According to the order, the objection appears to have been aimed at a different case, Rodriguez v. Google LLC, the Web & App Activity case in which a jury ordered Google to pay $425.7 million in September 2025. The court overruled it on the merits anyway.

Goldstone objected that the unnamed cy pres recipient could be "heavily funded by Google or tied to the attorneys," and that "99.5% of the notified class will receive nothing." The judge said he misread the provision: a cy pres payment happens only when redistribution becomes uneconomic, and only with court approval. Illustrating the threshold, the order says that if "there is $100 left in the fund but it costs $101 to redistribute the remainder, only then would the remainder be distributed to a cy pres recipient."

Brown said she could not supply serial numbers or proof of purchase, that her children were minors when they used the devices, and that the plan of allocation was "unspecified." The court found her children, now adults according to her own exhibits, could have filed their own privacy class claims, and that the plan is posted on the settlement website.

Procedural notes

A few details in the order do not line up with earlier records. The order states that "[t]he parties moved for preliminary approval of class action settlement in March of 2026," and cites two orders, ECF Nos. 553 and 560, as granting it. PPC Land's January report described a preliminary approval motion filed on January 23, 2026, with a final approval hearing then proposed for March 19, 2026. The fairness hearing actually took place on October 1, 2026. The order does not explain the sequence, and the two docket entries suggest more than one round before preliminary approval was granted.

The order also describes the case as having begun "seven years ago" and counsel as having litigated it "for almost six years" and "for more than six years." The first complaint was filed in July 2019, so the case is a little over seven years old.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Voice assistants sit at the edge of advertising, but the questions in this case run straight into it. The core allegation is about data captured without a clear trigger and passed to third parties for processing, the same pattern at the center of tracking litigation across the industry. The two claims that gave the case its legal footing, Section 632 and the federal Wiretap Act, are the statutes now routinely used against website pixels and session-recording tools.

The order also shows how far monetary outcomes in privacy class actions can sit from the headline numbers. A settlement valued against $448.8 million in theoretical damages pays $68 million, and individual privacy class members are expected to receive single-digit dollar amounts. In March 2026, a different judge in the same district approved Google's RTB settlement, which paid class members nothing but required a new control limiting data sent into real-time bidding auctions, and cut the requested fees from $128 million to about $21.9 million. Judge Freeman, by contrast, granted the full percentage fee here because the cross-check showed counsel were barely above their hourly value.

Voice data is a recurring subject in PPC Land's privacy coverage. Apple agreed to pay $95 million in January 2025 to settle Lopez v. Apple over unintended Siri recordings, a case the Kumandan order cites for both its five-device cap and its fee rates. Since then, Google has put Gemini in place of Assistant on smart speakers and displays, a rollout that began in October 2025. The devices at issue in Kumandan were sold from May 2016 onward; the settlement releases claims about how they behaved, not about the AI systems now running on them.

The claims process itself carries a lesson about fraud. The court accepted, with little hesitation, that serial numbers and proof of purchase are justified because automated bots file false claims at scale. Similar verification friction now shapes consumer settlements across the technology sector, and it explains part of why a 173.8 million email campaign produced fewer than 1.5 million timely claims.

What comes next

Class counsel must file a proposed judgment that matches the order, with the opt-out list attached. Once the court enters judgment, any appeal by an objector could delay distribution. If no appeal is filed, A.B. Data will process the timely claims, decide whether to accept the 40,000-plus late ones, and pay claimants by electronic transfer, ACH, Zelle, Venmo, PayPal or check.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the US District Court for the Northern District of California; plaintiffs Asif Kumandan, Melissa Spurr, Lourdes Galvan and Eleeanna Galvan; Google LLC; class counsel from Lowey Dannenberg, Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law, the Lexington Law Group and the Wood Law Firm; claims administrator A.B. Data; and seven objecting class members.

What: An order granting final approval of a $68 million non-reversionary settlement over Google Assistant recordings, certifying a purchaser class and a privacy class, awarding class counsel $22,666,666.70 in fees and $1,021,738.40 in expenses, cutting service awards from $10,000 to $5,000 each, and overruling all objections. The court reduced four partners' hourly rates, including a $3,000 request it called "patently unreasonable," without changing the fee.

When: The order is dated October 13, 2026, after a fairness hearing on October 1, 2026. The case began in July 2019, and the settlement covers device purchases from May 18, 2016 to the date of preliminary approval.

Where: San Jose Division of the Northern District of California, case 5:19-cv-04286-BLF, Document 584.

Why: The order converts a settlement agreement into a payable fund, with more than 1.49 million timely claimants expected to receive between $2 and $56 each. Its reasoning on fees, service awards, claim verification and settlement class certification shows how courts weigh privacy class settlements built on recording and interception statutes, the same laws now used against tracking technology across digital advertising.