Earlier this year, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied a request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, known as EPIC, to compel the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its 2011 consent order with Google Inc. Within days, Google, the FTC and countless news publications and pundits, almost unanimously, voiced the position that EPIC, which was not suing Google and was a non-party to the consent order, had no grounds to bring suit due to lack of standing.
As widely predicted, it turned out that they were right. The court, without even reaching the merits of the complaint, granted the FTC’s motion to dismiss. Hours after the decision was handed down, EPIC filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that was summarily dismissed four days after Google’s new privacy policy went into effect.
