Google will erase a large amount of search data as part of a settlement of a lawsuit that alleged the company tracked millions of users without their knowledge while they believed they were browsing the internet privately.
Terms of the settlement were filed on Monday in the Oakland, California federal court, and require approval by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
Users claimed that Google, which is owned by Alphabet a California-based company, used its analytics, apps, and cookies to unlawfully monitor individuals’ browsing activities, even when they were in incognito or private mode.
If a proposed settlement filed Monday in San Francisco federal court is approved by a judge, Google must “delete and/or remediate billions of data records” linked to people using the Chrome browser’s incognito mode, according to court documents.
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said the company was pleased to settle the lawsuit, which it always considered meritless.
“We never associate data with users when they use Incognito mode,” Castaneda said. “We are happy to delete old technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalization.”
The class action began in 2020, covering millions of Google users who used private browsing since June 1, 2016.
They said this turned Google into an “unaccountable trove of information” by letting it learn about their friends, favorite foods, hobbies, shopping habits, and the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” they hunt for online.
Users alleged 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.
Their lawyers estimated the privacy issues to be worth between $5 billion to $7.8 billion. However, Google won’t have to pay any money as part of the agreement. Still, the individuals involved can seek compensation separately through their own legal actions.
“This settlement is an historic step in requiring dominant technology companies to be honest in their representations to users about how the companies collect and employ user data, and to delete and remediate data collected,” lawyer David Boies said in the filing.
As part of fixing the data, Google must erase details that could identify private browsing data. This includes removing specific information like IP addresses, generalizing User-Agent strings, and only keeping the domain part of URLs instead of detailed ones.
Furthermore, Google is required to delete the X-Client-Data header field, which it described as capturing information about Chrome’s installation state and any server-side experiments that could impact it.
Other settlement terms require Google to block third-party cookies within 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 the year.
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