Oh great they get to collect and make money off of "anonymous technical data" for years, and their punishment for doing all that is to delete the data, and swear they won't collect anymore of it for the next few years??
They already made their money off of people's data! This isn't a meaningful punishment, hell it's barely a slap on the wrist.
Bro we promise bro, we're deleting the data - We know bro, you thought we didn't collect it but bro we're deleting it we promise now we're cool bro just keep using it bro we don't collect more data bro we promise
The lawsuit [PDF], filed in June, 2020, on behalf of plaintiffs Chasom Brown, Maria Nguyen, and William Byatt, sought to hold Google accountable for making misleading statements about privacy.
But, as alleged in the lawsuit, Google didn't provide the privacy it promised and implied through services like Chrome's Incognito mode.
Chrome's Incognito mode only provides privacy in the client by not keeping a locally stored record of the user's browsing history.
Even so, it was sanctioned nearly $1 million in 2022 by Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen – for concealing details about how it can detect when Chrome users employ Incognito mode.
"Google employees described Chrome Incognito Mode as 'misleading,' 'effectively a lie,' a 'confusing mess,' a 'problem of professional ethics and basic honesty,' and as being 'bad for users, bad for human rights, bad for democracy,'" according to the declaration [PDF] of Mark C Mao, a partner with the law firm of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, which represents the plaintiffs.
The settlement [PDF] requires that Google: inform users that it collects private browsing data, both in its Privacy Policy and in an Incognito Splash Screen; "must delete and/or remediate billions of data records that reflect class members' private browsing activities"; block third-party cookies in Incognito mode for the next five years (separately, Google is phasing out third-party cookies this year); and must delete the browser signals that indicate when private browsing mode is active, to prevent future tracking.
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