Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)-owned Google has agreed to delete hundreds of billions of records to settle a lawsuit claiming the search engine giant tracked people’s private browsing.
Google reportedly tracked people’s sessions on Chrome’s incognito mode, which plaintiffs argued collected data despite assurances it wouldn’t in a privacy policy.
“Despite its representations that users are in control of what information Google will track and collect, Google's various tracking tools [...] are actually designed to automatically track users when they visit webpages - no matter what settings a user chooses,” a June 2020 lawsuit claimed.
“This is true even when a user browses in private browsing mode.”
Google announced changes to its privacy policy and cookie options in January after the two sides agreed to settle the case, which had sought US$5 billion (£3.98 billion) in damages.
As a part of that settlement, Google agreed to make it clearer that user browsing was still tracked even when people were in incognito mode while introducing a feature automatically blocking third-party cookies.
Google said on Monday that the records would be destroyed as part of efforts to settle the case.
“We are pleased to settle this lawsuit, which we always believed was meritless,” Google spokesman Jorge 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.”