If the agreement is approved by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in July, Google will avoid a lawsuit, but will have to “suppress and/or remediate billions of data records” collected while browsing by people using incognito mode. “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”, the document reads.
Google has committed to “immediately” reformulating the information available about anonymous mode, to “inform users that it collects private browsing data”. And the company must block third-party cookies by default in anonymous mode – those computer programs used in particular to track users online and target them in advertising. Google has already started the transition to end these highly criticized programs.
The agreement does not provide for the payment of compensation, whereas the complaint filed in 2020 claimed five billion dollars. But it maintains the possibility for Chrome users who consider themselves injured to sue Google individually.
The initial complaint accused Google of having “turned itself into an unaccountable mine of information, information so detailed and so vast that not even George Orwell could have dreamed of it.”
