Google has been scrambling in recent months to resolve its backlog of cases ahead of a major antitrust lawsuit with the Justice Department later this year.
The company on Monday settled its fourth lawsuit in four months, agreeing to delete billions of data records it collected about millions of Chrome browser users, according to legal filings. Suits, Chasom Brown et al. Google said the company misled users by tracking his online activity in Chrome's incognito mode, which the company believed was private.
Since December, Google has spent well over $1 billion resolving lawsuits as it prepares to battle the Justice Department, which has targeted Google's search engine and its advertising business in two lawsuits.
In December, Google settled a lawsuit with dozens of attorneys general for forcing app makers to pay higher fees. Six weeks later, the company settled a lawsuit accusing it of inappropriately sharing users' personal information from the defunct social media site Google+. And in March, Google agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to Massachusetts company Singular Computing after it was accused of stealing patented designs, an allegation Google denies.
The proposed settlement, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, states that to put an end to the Incognito mode claims, Google will “disclose information to notify users that Google is collecting private browsing data.” It is said that he promised to “rewrite the book”. Users can already see the disclosure on the landing page when they open Incognito mode.
Google has agreed to keep changes to Incognito mode that block third-party cookies by default for the next five years. This limits the amount of web users that can be tracked per site.
“This requirement will further ensure privacy for incognito users going forward, while also limiting the amount of data Google collects from users,” plaintiffs' lawyers led by prominent attorney David Boies said in the filing. I mentioned it in.
Google will also stop using technology that detects when you enable private browsing, so it will no longer be able to track your choice to use Incognito mode. Google will not pay plaintiffs as part of the settlement, but individuals have the option of suing the company for damages.
Google said in a statement that the lawsuit was without merit.
“Plaintiffs originally wanted $5 billion, but they received zero,” Google spokesman Jose Castañeda said. “We are happy to delete obsolete technical data that is not associated with an individual or used for any form of personalization.”
The trial was scheduled to begin in early February, but the parties announced in December that they had agreed to a settlement.
“This settlement prevents Google from secretly collecting billions of dollars worth of user data, by Google's own estimates,” Boies said Monday.