You are best off reading the actual Complaint to determine who the parties are and the specific allegations against Google...that said the article included this single allegation against Google from the Complaint:

>"Google's lies," according to the lawsuit, included a statement on a privacy page for Apps for Education, which was on the web from at least June 2011 to September 2012, and said the apps were "completely ad-free -- which means your school's content is not processed by Google's advertising systems."

That statement from Google would only be a lie if the students were getting ads. The article says the complaint is that "the firm harvested their data for commercial gain without their consent". I could not determine from the article exactly what harvesting was done or what commercial gain derived from that.

Google has maintained that the email scanning for targeted advertising is not a privacy issue in that it is automated and there are no details leaked outside the system. If it turned out that the scanning was done and no actions resulted from that then the whole thing would become philosophical.

They lied because they claimed the emails weren't being scanned:

"which means your school's content is not processed by Google's advertising systems"

Perhaps it was being scanned by a different system which is not part of the advertisement systems?

What does "processed" mean in this context? Can an advertising system which produces no advertising be considered to have processed anything?

Edit:

"The article mentions clearly that..."

"Google's lies," according to the lawsuit, included a statement on a privacy page for Apps for Education, which was on the web from at least June 2011 to September 2012, and said the apps were "completely ad-free -- which means your school's content is not processed by Google's advertising systems."

From the community guidelines[1]:

"Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. 'Did you even read the article? It mentions that' can be shortened to 'The article mentions that.'"

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Cui bono? who benefits?

There are general principles in the law that would say in this specific case, Google is making money off this arrangement, this arrangement is based on making money off of scanning emails, people wronged by this arrangement have a right to recompense, so follow the money, that's where the recompense should come from.

Companies cannot dodge liability for their actions by hiding behind third parties. Otherwise, the UPS or Fedex labelled truck that just ran over your kid would, every time, turn out to be a flat broke independent contractor Uber driver that all the other companies in the chain would point the finger at.

I think this a flawed analysis of the economics of the situation. The entity benefiting here is the school, by avoiding having to pay for email hosting. That Google gets paid (in cash or otherwise) for providing that service is not surprising, and not at all analogous to hiring an independent contractor.

IANAL, but it seems to me the important consideration here is who has duty of care regarding the students, and it's seems clear that it's the school.

Now, if Google lied regarding the scanning, the complaint may be valid, but that's a different argument.

What I described is actually how it works as I was taught in a university law course. Your "economic analysis" sounds to me like logical speculation on your part, which while it may be a superficially valid way to parse the situation, and under historical common law could have been how courts determined the outcome, is from what I learned simply not how courts actually handle it. "Saved costs" is not a category from which a judgement could be obtained, while "profits" is, and "profits" is an actual motivation to set up an unclean liability shifting arrangement.

You will see this case continue to move forward through the courts which it would not--plaintiff's lawyers would not even pursue it--if you were correct.

and as a final point, I was not drawing an analogy to independent contract workers, I was using one as an example of an arrangement a court would see through; remove that term and my argument still applies.