The federal judge overseeing the long-running civil litigation over claims that Google's Street View vehicles snooped on unencrypted WiFi networks at the turn of the last decade grappled with objections to a proposed $13 million class action settlement the company has proposed. 

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California called the matter before him "a paradigmatic case of injury and non-ascertainable damages" at a fairness hearing Friday over the proposed deal, a so-called cy pres settlement that would provide no direct payout to class members.

The proposed deal faced objection from a group of state attorneys general concerned about the lack of cash going to plaintiffs as well as an objector represented by class action watchdog Ted Frank of the Center for Class Action Fairness.

Breyer opened the hearing by saying that he clearly thought that the plaintiffs had standing to sue. "I think there was injury, and I think that it's an important vindication of an individual's rights to be able to seek redress in a court for an injury, especially for an injury for privacy," Breyer said. Breyer held off ruling, saying he intended to lay out his thoughts in a forthcoming written opinion. But the judge spent much of the hearing probing counsel for the company and the class about issues raised by the deal's critics. 

Representing the proposed settlement class, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll's Daniel Small said that there are an estimated 60 million class members—a number partially based on Google's disclosure to the Canadian government that its Street View vehicles collected data from 6 million unencrypted commercial and residential wireless networks in that country, which has about a 10th of the population of the U.S. Small said that the proposed deal before Breyer would add at least two years to the injunctive relief, including internal privacy policy changes and additional web disclosures from Google, which state attorneys general secured in their own 2013 settlement with Google.   

Arizona's Solicitor General O.H. Skinner, who was representing a coalition of nine attorneys general who weighed in with an amicus brief urging the court deny approval to the settlement, said that deal did nothing to extend the state's key concession from Google to destroy the scooped up data and cease its collection program. Skinner urged the judge to push the parties to establish a claims process, arguing that putting money in the pockets of consumers was more valuable to the class than contributing to the designated non-profit recipients of the cy pres funds.

"Putting $10 million dollars into the pockets of 2 million people is meaningful," said Skinner, positing what he said could be a reasonable number of people filing claims.

Representing Google, Brian Willen of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati said that the problem with any claims process is that potential class members—people whose data Google accessed—don't have access to the fact that they're a potential class member. Plaintiffs in their court filings have indicated that the WiFi equipment that corresponds to the data Google harvested is now more than a decade old and likely discarded by consumers.

Frank, who was representing musician David Lowery, the founder of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, who claims he worked at a music studio with an unencrypted network at the time of Google's data-harvesting, said that if no one can prove they're a member of the class, perhaps the case is not appropriate for a classwide resolution. Still, he, like Skinner, urged the court to force the parties to pay the settlement funds to class members.

"They don't maximize the recovery by giving it to third parties," Frank said.