Google illegally misled Australian phone users when it kept collecting location data after users thought they had turned off location tracking, the Federal Court has found.

In a world-first judgment that could cost the tech giant tens of millions of dollars in fines, Justice Thomas Thawley found that Android phone users would have been deceived by the settings on Android phones, which allowed Google to keep tracking, cataloguing and profiting from a user’s location, even after the user had explicitly set location data to “off”.