This settlement resolved a 2018 class action accusing Google of logging where phone users went even after they switched the Location History setting off. Google paid $62 million, but none of it reaches the roughly 247.7 million people in the class — and on August 26, 2026 a federal appeals court said that was allowed.
What the Appeals Court Decided
On August 26, 2026 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the final approval of the $62 million settlement in In re Google Location History Litigation, rejecting an appeal by three objecting class members. The vote was 2-1.The practical result for readers is short. Nobody in the class receives a payment, and there is no claim form to look for, because this settlement never had a claims process at any stage. The money that is left after fees and costs goes to nonprofit organizations that work on internet privacy, under a doctrine called cy pres. The objectors argued the class should have been given a chance to claim the money first; the majority held the district court did not abuse its discretion in concluding a direct distribution was infeasible.
Where the $62 Million Actually Goes
The settlement fund was never going to be split among class members. It was structured from the start to pay fees, costs and charitable recipients, and the district court's May 3, 2024 final approval order set the numbers:- $18,600,000 in attorneys' fees to class counsel.
- $151,756.23 in litigation expenses.
- $5,000 in a service award to each class representative.
- $42,640,000 divided in varying amounts among 21 nonprofit organizations.
The 21 recipients were selected for work on internet privacy and each submitted a project proposal to the court describing how the money would be used. They include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Internet Archive, the Rose Foundation, Free Press, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative, the Fordham University Center on Law and Information Policy, Yale Law School's Information Society Project, and the ACLU of Northern California Technology and Civil Liberties Program.
Why the Court Said Nobody Gets Paid
The arithmetic did most of the work. The settlement class covers all U.S. residents whose location information Google stored from a mobile device while Location History was disabled, at any point between January 1, 2014 and December 4, 2023 — roughly 247.7 million people, about three-quarters of the country. Divide $62 million by that figure and each person's share is no more than about 25 cents, and that is before subtracting a dollar for fees, costs or the expense of running a claims process.Under Ninth Circuit precedent, a fund counts as "non-distributable" when proving individual claims would be burdensome or distributing the damages would be costly, and the court has previously treated per-person recoveries at this scale as too small to distribute. The panel pointed to two earlier decisions with similar math: a Facebook settlement dividing $6.5 million among 3.6 million people, and the Google Street View settlement dividing $13 million among 60 million people.
Verification was the second problem. Google submitted evidence that its data-collection practices and systems make it infeasible to identify who actually fits the class definition — one person can hold several Google accounts, and one account can be shared by several people. The objectors proposed letting people self-identify and opt in, but the majority found they offered no method for checking whether a person who filed was really in the class, which would leave the process open to claims that could not be verified.
The majority also rejected the framing that cy pres gives the class nothing. Its answer was that the alternative on the table would pay a small sum to a small slice of the class while spending millions on administration. This is where the two sides' arithmetic diverges most sharply. The objectors argued that at the single-digit claims rates typical of a settlement with no direct notice, the roughly $42 million left after fees and costs would have reached a few million claimants at something like $15 to $17 each — not 25 cents — and that this beats nothing. The majority's answer was that a 1.5% claims rate leaves out 98.5% of the class, and the district court had administration estimates running from $1.9 million at a 1% claims rate to $8.2 million at 7%.
The Dissent: Cy Pres Is Supposed to Be the Second-Best Option
Judge Forrest dissented, and the disagreement is worth understanding because it is the argument that will follow this doctrine into the next case.Her position was that cy pres is an equitable fallback for money that genuinely cannot be distributed, not a first choice available whenever a class is large and the per-person figure is small. On her reading, the district court leaned on three justifications — that class members are hard to identify, that a claims process would be expensive, and that individual recoveries would be tiny — and none of them, alone or together, establishes that this fund was undistributable. She noted that even at the highest estimated administration cost of $8.2 million, more than $30 million would still have been left for the people who were actually injured.
On verification, she wrote that the ordinary tools of consumer class actions — claims administrators, auditing, fraud sampling, follow-up notices, sworn claim forms — are normally presumed adequate, and that Google had not explained why they could not work here. And she drew a distinction the majority did not accept: a dollar paid to a charity is not the same as a dollar paid to an injured person, because we would never tell an individual plaintiff that giving their damages to a good cause made them whole.
Her closing line is the one likely to be quoted: cy pres is "an extraordinary tool for extraordinary cases," and the record here did not show this was one, given that no distribution was ever attempted.
What Cy Pres Means, in Plain Terms
Cy pres comes from a Norman French phrase meaning "as near as possible." In class actions it describes paying settlement money to nonprofits whose work is judged to indirectly benefit the class, rather than to the class itself. Courts most often use it for leftovers — uncashed checks, or a residue too small to justify another distribution round after a claims process has run.What makes this case contested is that the entire monetary fund went that route with no claims process at all. The Supreme Court flagged concerns about that structure in Frank v. Gaos in 2019 without resolving them, and it has been argued over ever since. Our cy pres explainer covers how recipients are chosen, the substantial nexus standard the court applied here, and why leftover class money does not simply go back to the defendant.
The objectors also argued that some recipients do ideological work at odds with a substantial portion of the class, and 20 state attorneys general filed an amicus brief supporting them. The panel declined to add that as a fourth factor, reasoning that in a class of 247.7 million people some disagreement with any recipient is unavoidable, and that requiring universal approval would be unworkable. It also rejected geographic objections to three recipients whose work reaches beyond the United States.
There Is No Claim Form — and No Site Can Get You One
This is the part most readers arrive looking for, so it is worth stating plainly. There is no claim form for this settlement, there never was one, and no deadline was ever set. A claims process only exists where a court has ordered money distributed to class members and appointed an administrator to work out who gets what. That did not happen here.The official settlement website is real, and it publishes the notice, the settlement agreement, the cy pres proposals and the court filings. What it does not have, and never had, is a claim portal. If you find a page inviting you to "file your claim" for the Google Location History settlement, or asking for personal details to check your eligibility for a payout, it is not connected to this case. Several such pages exist and some carry invented deadlines.
One thing did close, back in 2024: the exclusion window, which ran out on March 4, 2024. Class members who did not opt out by then released the claims the settlement covers, which is what Google bought with the $62 million. That deadline fell two months before the court entered final approval on May 3, so anyone deciding whether to stay in was doing it before the recipients and their amounts were set.
What the Case Accused Google of Doing
Allegations Only · No Finding of Liability
The account below comes from the plaintiffs' complaint. These are unproven allegations. Google denied them, the settlement resolves the case without any admission of liability, and no court has found Google liable. This page is informational and is not legal advice.
The case was consolidated before Judge Edward J. Davila in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California as case number 5:18-cv-05062. It went through years of motion practice before the parties reached the settlement, which the court preliminarily approved along with certification of a settlement class. Google denied wrongdoing throughout.
What Google Agreed to Change
The settlement was not purely monetary, and this mattered to the outcome. Alongside the fund, Google agreed to change the conduct at issue and not to repeat it, including maintaining a policy for a period of years of automatically deleting location information collected through Location History and Web & App Activity after a set retention window, and letting users set their own auto-delete periods.The objectors argued this relief was illusory because it largely tracked obligations Google had already taken on in 2022 settlements with state attorneys general. The district court was not persuaded, and the panel treated the injunctive component as a real part of the deal — enough that the majority pushed back on calling this an "all-cy pres" settlement at all, since class members did get something, just not money.
Whether that is worth much to any individual reader is a fair question, and the dissent's answer was essentially no. But it is the reason the case is not quite the pure test of cy pres-only settlements that the headline suggests.
How This Fits Google's Other Privacy Settlements
Google has resolved a long run of privacy class actions, and they have landed in very different places for consumers. Sorting them by what the class actually received is the most useful way to read them:- Nothing, by design. This case, and the Google Incognito private browsing settlement, which produced data deletion and disclosure changes but no fund and no claim form at all. The Google real-time bidding settlement is the same shape and is itself on appeal to the Ninth Circuit — Google built a new Partner Ads privacy control instead of paying the class.
- Money, but paid automatically. The $350 million California Android cellular data settlement, where covered California Android users are paid without filing anything.
- Money through a real claims process. The Google Play children's privacy settlement and the $68 million Google Assistant privacy settlement, whose claim window ran through August 27, 2026.
- Still being litigated. The Web & App Activity case, where a jury returned a $425 million verdict rather than a negotiated cy pres deal.
The sharpest comparison is the oldest one. The $23 million Google search referrer settlement began life as an $8.5 million cy pres-only deal covering about 129 million people. The Supreme Court sent it back in Frank v. Gaos on a standing question, and the case eventually re-settled for $23 million with an actual claims process that paid claimants an estimated $7.70 each. That is the outcome the objectors here were pointing at: same court, same doctrine, same defendant, and a claims process that worked.
It is also why the dissent matters more than a losing opinion usually does. The disagreement is not about Google — it is about whether a class this large is by definition beyond paying, and that question will recur in every large-scale privacy case.
What Happens Next
Nothing is required of class members, and there is nothing to watch for. The panel affirmed final approval, which clears the way for the cy pres distributions the district court ordered.The objectors retain the ordinary post-decision options — asking the Ninth Circuit to rehear the case, or petitioning the Supreme Court — and their counsel has taken cy pres questions to the Supreme Court before, which is how Frank v. Gaos got there. They flagged that route themselves during the appeal, telling the panel in their reply brief that the case was ripe for rehearing en banc and that they were willing to petition for it. As of August 27, 2026, no rehearing petition or certiorari petition had been docketed, and neither would change the absence of a claims process in this case even if filed.
One argument survives untouched for a future case. The objectors also contended that the settlement exceeded the district court's authority under Article III by letting it designate recipients, allocate funds and supervise the distribution for years. The panel declined to reach it because it had not been raised in the district court — the objectors maintained they had preserved it by objecting below to the court's role in picking recipients and setting each award — and said the question deserves a fuller presentation before any court rules on it. The dissent agreed it was forfeited while noting the concern is not trivial. That is an open question, not a resolved one.
Questions
Is there a Google Location History settlement claim form?
No, and there never was one. This settlement was structured so that no money is distributed to class members, so the court never appointed a claims process, never set a claim deadline and never opened a claim portal. Any website inviting you to file a claim for the $62 million Google Location History settlement is not connected to it. The official settlement website exists to publish the notice, the settlement agreement and the court filings, not to accept claims.
How much will Google Location History class members be paid?
Nothing. The district court calculated that dividing the $62 million fund across a class of roughly 247.7 million people would produce no more than about 25 cents each before any fees, costs or administration expenses were deducted, and held the fund was non-distributable on that basis. After $18.6 million in attorneys' fees, $151,756.23 in litigation expenses and service awards of $5,000 to each class representative, the remaining $42.64 million was divided among 21 nonprofit organizations rather than paid to class members.
What did the Ninth Circuit decide on August 26, 2026?
A three-judge panel affirmed the district court's final approval of the settlement by a 2-1 vote. The majority held that the district court considered the factors Rule 23(e)(2) requires, that a direct distribution to the class was infeasible, and that the 21 nonprofit recipients had a substantial nexus to the data privacy interests of the class. Judge Forrest dissented, writing that cy pres is appropriate only when settlement funds are truly non-distributable and that this had not been shown.
What is a cy pres settlement?
Cy pres is the practice of paying class settlement money to nonprofit organizations whose work is judged to indirectly benefit the class, instead of to class members. Courts normally use it for leftover funds after a claims process, or where per-person amounts would be too small to distribute. A settlement where all of the money goes to nonprofits and none reaches the class is the contested version, and it is what the objectors challenged here.
Which organizations received the Google Location History settlement money?
Twenty-one nonprofits selected for work on internet privacy shared $42.64 million in amounts set by the district court. They include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Internet Archive, the Rose Foundation, Free Press, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative, the Fordham University Center on Law and Information Policy, Yale Law School's Information Society Project and the ACLU of Northern California Technology and Civil Liberties Program. The objectors challenged nine of the twenty-one.
Can I still sue Google over Location History myself?
Class members who did not opt out by the March 4, 2024 exclusion deadline released the claims covered by the settlement, and that release is what the $62 million bought. That deadline passed two months before the court entered final approval, and it cannot be reopened. If you believe you have a claim that falls outside the release, that is a question for a lawyer about your own situation rather than something this settlement provides a route for.
Did Google admit it did anything wrong?
No. Google settled without admitting liability, and no court has found that Google violated the plaintiffs' privacy rights. The allegations that Google kept collecting and storing location data after users switched Location History off were never tested at trial.
Sources
• In re Google Location History Litigation / Patacsil v. Google LLC, No. 24-3387 (9th Cir. Aug. 26, 2026) — published opinion• Ninth Circuit appellate docket, No. 24-3387 — CourtListener
• Oral argument, June 11, 2025 — recording on CourtListener
• Reply Brief of Objectors-Appellants, No. 24-3387 (filed February 5, 2025) — the objectors' feasibility evidence, their opt-out timing argument and their en banc request
• Order Granting Final Settlement Approval and Granting Motion for Attorneys' Fees, Expenses, and Service Awards, No. 5:18-cv-05062-EJD (N.D. Cal. May 3, 2024) — Justia
• Official settlement website — notice, settlement agreement, cy pres proposals and court filings at Google Location History Settlement
• Court-approved class notice — PR Newswire
• Reporting on the district court's approval — Courthouse News Service
• The objectors' own case page, from their counsel — Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute
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