Court Approves $30 Million Settlement in SGT’s Pioneering Child Tracking Litigation Against Google and YouTube

September 24, 2025

A California federal judge has granted preliminary approval to the $30 million settlement in Silver Golub & Teitell’s case against Google LLC and its YouTube subsidiary for illegally collecting the personal information of children and then using it to show them targeted advertisements.

The settlement, approved in an order signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen on September 23, provides compensation to an estimated class of between 35 million and 45 million children under 13 whose data was allegedly misappropriated without their parents’ consent.

The settlement followed six years of litigation that included five different judges, multiple challenges to the pleadings, and a successful precedent-setting appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

Filed in 2019, the case was dismissed twice by United States District Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the Northern District of California based on her conclusion that Plaintiffs’  claims premised on violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) were preempted under federal law. In December 2022 SGT obtained reversal of this decision in a unanimous landmark decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals holding that state law remedies for violations overlapping with COPPA were not preempted by federal law.

COPPA itself does not provide a private right of action. The larger obstacle, however, was that courts had consistently held that COPPA preempted state-law claims predicated on COPPA violations. As a result, individuals could not pursue compensation under state law for conduct that also violated COPPA, leaving enforcement solely to federal and state regulators.

The appellate ruling changed that, holding instead that COPPA does not foreclose state-law claims that run parallel to its protections. This decision is significant because it opens door to children and families to seek compensation for harms caused by unlawful data-collection practices that violate COPPA .

In January 2025, Judge Van Keulen announced her intention to uphold privacy claims and some state consumer protection law claims. “Based on these allegations, the court may reasonably infer at the pleading stage that Google knew it was collecting children's data through YouTube in violation of the COPPA,” Judge van Keulen wrote at the time.

The case is Hubbard et al. v. Google et al., No. 5:19-cv-07016 (N.D. Cal.) and is pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

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