Google is set to purge billions of data records in order to settle a lawsuit alleging that it secretly monitored the internet use of people who were of the mind that they had been browsing privately.
The terms of the settlement were filed on Monday in the Oakland, California federal court, and needed an approval by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
The defendant’s lawyers have valued the accord to be over $5 billion, and as costly as $7.8 billion. Google will be paying no damages, but its users can individually sue the company for damages.
The class action suit kicked off in 2020 and it involved millions of Google users who used private browsing since June 1, 2016.
The users claimed that Google’s analytics, cookies and apps let the Alphabet unit improperly track people who set Google’s Chrome browser to “Incognito” mode and other browsers to “private” browsing mode.
According to them, the discovery turned Google into an unaccountable trove of information by allowing it learn about their friends, favorite foods, hobbies, shopping habits, and the “most personal and potentially embarrassing things” they scour for online.
Google will under the settlement, update disclosures about what it collects in “private” browsing, a process the company has said has begun. Google will also be permitting Incognito users to block third-party cookies for up to five years.
Meanwhile the spokesperson for Google, Jose Castaneda has said that the company is pleased to settle the lawsuit, which it had always considered lacking.
“We never link 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 personalization.” Castaneda had been quoted to have said.
The lawsuit is titled:
Brown et al v Google LLC et al, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 20-03664.
