On Monday, the first details emerged from the settlement with Google. Class action lawsuit over Chrome's incognito user tracking. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, could have required the company to pay $5 billion in damages. Instead, wall street journal report Over the next five years, Google announced it will destroy „billions of data points“ it improperly collected, update its data collection disclosures, and keep Chrome set to block third-party cookies by default.
The lawsuit accused Google of misleading Chrome users about how private Incognito Browsing actually is. The company claimed to have told customers that their information was private, even though it was monitoring their activities. Google defended its practices, saying it warned Chrome users that Incognito mode doesn't mean they're „invisible“ and that sites can still see their activity.Reconciliation came first reported in december.
The lawsuit originally sought damages of $5,000 per user for charges related to federal wiretapping laws and California privacy laws. Google tried unsuccessfully to have the lawsuit dismissed, and in 2021 Judge Lucy Koh ruled that the company: You “didn’t notify” users that you were still collecting data While incognito mode is active.
Engadget emailed Google for comment on the details of the settlement. We will update this article if we receive a response.
The lawsuit's findings included emails in late 2022 that publicly revealed some of the company's concerns about Incognito's false privacy. In 2019, Google's chief marketing officer Lorraine Twohill told CEO Sundar Pichai that the word „private“ was the wrong term for Incognito mode because it risked „exacerbating known misconceptions.“ he suggested. In a subsequent email exchange, Twohill said, „Because Secrets are not truly private, there are limits to how strongly we can market them, and they are therefore highly ambiguous and potentially more damaging.'' We need words to avoid this.''
The court did not approve the class of plaintiffs for economic damages, so users must sue Google as individuals to recover damages. Some people didn't waste time. Already on Thursday, a group of 50 people filed a separate lawsuit in California state court over privacy violations.
A trial in the case was originally scheduled for February. The settlement requires final approval from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California before it becomes official.
„This settlement is a historic step in demanding honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies,“ attorney David Boies, representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. wall street journal.
One part of the settlement, a requirement that Google disable third-party tracking cookies by default for the next five years, may already be controversial.Company's Privacy Sandbox Initiatives had already planned to disable all third-party cookies for Chrome users by the end of the year. These are replaced by the Topics API, a system that bypasses cookies by categorizing your browsing activity into locally stored topics. This new system will allow advertisers to target ads to users without directly accessing their browsing data.
There are also questions about how effective it is to destroy improperly collected data. Given that the lawsuit covers information dating back to 2016, it is likely that the company long ago sold much of the data to third parties or incorporated it into other products that are not covered by the settlement. It would be natural to think about it.
Google will also need to rewrite its privacy disclosure regarding its data collection practices in incognito mode.it said WSJ The changes have already started to take effect.