Google has agreed to purge billions of data records reflecting users’ browsing activity to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming the search giant tracked users in its Chrome browser without their knowledge or consent.
The class action lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleges that the company misled users by tracking their web browsing activities, who believed they were staying private when using “incognito” or “private” modes on web browsers such as Chrome.
In late December 2023, news broke that the company had agreed to settle the lawsuit. The deal is currently awaiting approval from U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
“Regardless of any challenges posed by Google’s limited recordkeeping, the settlement provides broad relief,” a court filing dated April 1, 2024 said.
“Most of the private browsing data in these logs will be deleted entirely, including billions of event-level data records reflecting class members’ private browsing activity.”
As part of the data remediation process, Google was also required to remove information that makes private browsing data identifiable by editing data points such as IP addresses, summarizing user agent strings, and removing detailed URLs within specific websites (i.e., only retaining domain name). the hierarchical part of the URL).
It was also asked to remove the so-called X-Client-Data header field, which Google describes as the Chrome-Variations header that captures “the installation status of Chrome itself, including active variants and servers.” -Side experiments that may affect installation. “
This header is generated based on a random seed value, making it unique enough to identify a specific Chrome user.
Other terms of the settlement require Google to block third-party cookies in Chrome’s incognito mode for five years, a setting the company has already implemented for all users. The tech company has separately announced plans to eliminate tracking cookies by default by the end of this year.
Google has since updated the wording on Incognito Mode in January 2024 to clarify that the setting does not change “how the sites you visit and the services you use, including Google, collect data.”
The lawsuit draws admissions from Google employees, who describe the browser’s private browsing mode as a “confusing confusion,” “effectively a lie” and “a matter of professional ethics and basic honesty.”
It further revealed internal communications, with senior executives arguing that stealth mode should not be called “private” because it risked “exacerbating known misunderstandings.”
Google says it has started automatically blocking bulk senders in Gmail that don’t meet email sender guidelines to reduce spam and phishing attacks.
The new requirements force email senders who push more than 5,000 messages per day to their Gmail accounts to provide a one-click unsubscribe option and to respond to unsubscribe requests within two days.
