The class action lawsuit had been filed in 2020, with the plaintiffs accusing the Mountain View giant of invading privacy by collecting information about their online activities when using Google Chrome’s incognito mode. The company was subject to a $5 billion fine, or at least a $5,000 fine for each affected user.
This Monday, Google closed the agreement to reformulate the anonymous browsing system, avoiding paying compensation, at least at this stage. According to the document that was delivered to the San Francisco court, the company will have to delete billions of records that were collected while using Chrome’s Incognito mode.
The agreement still has to be approved by the court and, although the process is limited to the United States, Google has also committed to deleting user data globally.
A Google has committed to changing incognito mode and blocking third-party cookies, which limits the possibility of users being tracked by companiesa measure that will take effect over the next 5 years.
“This requirement ensures additional privacy for anonymous users in the future, while also limiting the amount of data Google collects,” said the plaintiffs’ lawyers, led by David Boies.
Google will also stop using technology that detects when users activate private browsing, so that it cannot signal the choice to use incognito mode.
In the process it was recognized that Google wrongly used this system, with company employees admitting that it was “in practice a lie” and which raised problems of professional ethics and elementary honesty, as the lawyers mentioned in the document.
“This agreement constitutes a historic step, because it requires dominant technology companies to prove honesty in their statements to users regarding the way they collect and use their data and to delete the data thus collected”, say the same sources.
In January, even before the agreement was announced, Google had updated the rules to identify that it still collected information and data from users who browse incognito modealthough the information is not saved on the computer where Chrome is being used.
Google tried to defend itself against the accusations of the user group that brought the lawsuit forward, arguing that it warned users when they opened incognito mode. However, was not enough to convince judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers which, in August last year, rejected Google’s request for an early trial.
“We are pleased to resolve this lawsuit, which we have always believed to be unfounded,” Google spokesman Jorge Castaneda said in a statement, noting that the company would not pay any damages.
The company that is part of Alphabet has been under fire with several lawsuits related to the collection of information and anti-competitive practices. In the United States there are two separate processes that were initiated by the Federal Government and are still ongoingbut in recent months the company has opted to resolve processes through agreements.
In 2022, it paid around 400 million dollars in a lawsuit that accused Google of continuing to track the location of users who had chosen to disable that functionality. and in December 2023, it reached an agreement with several North American states that alleged that the company was limiting competition in the Android application store, paying more than 700 million dollars in compensation to customers.
Tags: Google starts deleting data collected Chromes incognito mode Internet
