Aug 20 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court said Google

must face a revived lawsuit by Google Chrome users who

said the company collected their personal information without

permission, after they chose not to synchronize their browsers

with their Google accounts.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said

the lower court judge who dismissed the proposed class action

should have assessed whether reasonable Chrome users consented

to letting Google collect their data when they browsed online.

Tuesday's 3-0 decision followed Google's agreement last year

to destroy billions of records to settle a lawsuit claiming the

Alphabet unit tracked people who thought they were browsing

privately, including in Chrome's "Incognito" mode.

Neither Google nor its lawyers immediately responded to

requests for comment.

Matthew Wessler, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he was

pleased with the decision and looked forward to a trial.

The proposed class covers Chrome users since July 27, 2016

who did not sync their browsers with their Google accounts.

They said Google should have honored Chrome's privacy

notice, which said users "don't need to provide any personal

information to use Chrome" and Google would not receive such

information unless they turned on the "sync" function.

The lower court judge concluded that Google's general

privacy policy allowing data collection governed, because the

Mountain View, California-based company would have collected the

plaintiffs' information regardless of which browsers they used.

In Tuesday's decision, Circuit Judge Milan Smith called that

focus misplaced.

"Here, Google had a general privacy disclosure yet promoted

Chrome by suggesting that certain information would not be sent

to Google unless a user turned on sync," Smith wrote. "A

reasonable user would not necessarily understand that they were

consenting to the data collection at issue."

The appeals court returned the case to U.S. District Judge

Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, who had dismissed

it in December 2022.

Google's settlement related to Incognito let users sue the

company individually for damages. Tens of thousands of users in

California alone have since done so in that state's courts.

The case is Calhoun et al v Google LLC, 9th U.S. Circuit

Court of Appeals, No. 22-16993.