On Monday, Google announced the first details of a settlement in a class-action lawsuit over Chrome tracking invisible users. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, could require the company to pay $5 billion in damages. instead, wall street journal Google will destroy “billions of data points” it improperly collected, update its data collection disclosures and maintain settings that block Chrome’s third-party cookies by default for the next five years, the report said.
The lawsuit accuses Google of misleading Chrome users about the true privacy of private browsing. It claims the company tells customers their messages are private – even as it monitors their activity. Google defended its approach, saying it warned Chrome users that stealth mode “does not mean ‘invisible'” and that websites could still see their activity. The settlement was first reported in December.
The lawsuit originally sought $5,000 in damages per user for alleged crimes related to federal wiretapping and California privacy laws. Google tried unsuccessfully to have the legal action thrown out, with Judge Lucy Koh ruling in 2021 that the company “failed to notify” users that it was still collecting data when incognito mode was active.
Engadget emailed Google for comment on the details of the settlement. We will update this article if we receive a response.
The emails uncovered by the lawsuit include public disclosures in late 2022 of some companies’ false privacy concerns about Incognito. In 2019, Google Chief Marketing Officer Lorraine Twohill suggested to CEO Sundar Pichai that “private” was the wrong word for Incognito Mode because it had Risk of “exacerbating known misunderstandings”. In a later email, Toohill wrote: “Our marketing efforts for incognito mode are limited because it is not truly private and therefore requires very vague, hedging language, which is almost more damaging.”
The court did not grant the plaintiff the economic damages category, so users must sue Google individually to obtain compensation. Some aren’t wasting any time: On Thursday, 50 people have filed separate lawsuits in California court over privacy violations.
A trial in the suit was originally scheduled for February. The settlement still requires final approval from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California before becoming official.
“This settlement is a historic step toward demanding honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies,” David Boies, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. wall street journal.
The settlement’s requirement that Google turn off third-party tracking cookies by default for the next five years may have become a contentious issue. The company’s Privacy Sandbox program has plans to disable all third-party cookies for Chrome users by the end of the year. It will replace them with the Topics API, a system that avoids cookies by classifying browsing activity into locally stored topics. The new system allows advertisers to target ads to users without directly accessing their browsing data.
The effectiveness of destroying improperly collected material is also questionable. Considering the information covered by the lawsuit dates back to 2016, it’s reasonable to assume that the company long ago sold much of the information to third parties or incorporated it into separate products not covered by the settlement agreement.
Google will also have to rewrite its privacy disclosures about its incognito mode data collection practices.it tells wall street journal It has started applying changes.
