March 27 (Reuters) - Lawyers who negotiated a class

action privacy settlement with Google are entitled to just a

fraction of the $128 million in fees they sought as an award for

their work, a U.S. federal judge ruled, finding that the

attorneys achieved only limited success.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland on

Thursday approved the settlement, which requires Google to

provide a new privacy controls but does not include any payment

to class members.

She awarded the plaintiffs' lawyers $21.8 million in legal

fees as class counsel in the case, slashing the amount of their

request by 80%.

The lead attorneys for the plaintiffs did not immediately

respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit was filed in 2021 and accused Google of sharing

and selling personal information to third parties in Google's

real-time bidding (RTB) auction service for digital advertising.

The consumer lawyers said the settlement would give millions of

U.S. Google account holders greater control over their privacy

by allowing them to limit the information Google shares about

them in the ad auctions.

In a statement, Google said it does not sell or share

personal data and that "we already have the strictest real-time

bidding restrictions in the industry." The company said it was

"pleased to put this case behind us."

Lawyers for the consumers told the court they spent more

than 46,500 hours over four years on the litigation. An expert

working for the plaintiffs placed the overall value of the

settlement at more than $1 billion, court records show.

Gonzalez Rogers in her order called the settlement adequate

"but by no means excellent." She said the plaintiffs' estimate

of the settlement value was "purely speculative" and questioned

whether the privacy controls would meaningfully impact Google.

Google had opposed the $128 million fee request, urging the

court to award the attorneys about $14 million.

The case is In re Google RTB Consumer Privacy Litigation,

U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No.

4:21-cv-02155-YGR.

For plaintiffs: Elizabeth Pritzker and Jon Levine of

Pritzker Levine

For defendant: Whitty Somvichian and Reece Trevor of Cooley

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