Google has agreed to destroy the private browsing history of countless users to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the tech giant of tracking activity in the Chrome browser’s Incognito Mode.
As many of you may recall, the legal battle originally kicked off back in 2020 when it was revealed the Alphabet-owned entity had misrepresented what it collected and when.
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Essentially, search data was still being scraped through advertising tools present on certain websites, collecting “potentially embarrassing” information. Google then turned around and leveraged this data to measure web traffic and sell advertising.
“Google has made itself an unaccountable trove of information so detailed and expansive that George Orwell could never have dreamed it,” wrote the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
Billions of data records reflecting the private browsing activities in question are now on track for deletion as part of the headline-making settlement. David Boies, an attorney representing the consumer plaintiffs, has called this victory a “historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies.”
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“Moreover, the settlement requires Google to delete and remediate, in unprecedented scope and scale, the data it improperly collected in the past,” Boies told CNN.
Google spokesperson José Castañeda claimed: “We never associate data with users when they use Incognito Mode. We are happy to delete old technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalisation.”
According to The Guardian, legal representatives for the plaintiffs evaluated the accord at over US$5 billion (and as high as US$7.8 billion); while nobody will receive damages, they may still sue individually for financial compensation.
