Court approves Google's privacy settlement with FTC

A federal judge on Friday approved a legal settlement under which Google would pay a record fine of $22.5 million to resolve federal allegations of privacy violations, even as objections were raised by a consumer group that argued the penalty was too weak.

US district judge Susan Illston, delivered the verdict hours following a brief hearing in San Francisco's federal court, which called the negotiated agreement "fair, adequate and reasonable."

The Federal Trade Commission had touted the penalty negotiated last summer, as the largest fine it had ever assessed in a case of the kind.

The settlement comes in an FTC investigation, which found that Google's advertising service used software "cookies" to track the web pages visited by people who used Apple's Safari Web browser, after it had earlier promised that it would not do so.

Google, though maintained that the tracking was not intentional. Though it did not admit to any legal violation, it agreed to disable the cookies.

Attorneys for both Google and the FTC spoke in favour of the settlement in court, while the agreement was opposed by the non-profit Consumer Watchdog group as ineffective.