Google has agreed to settle a consumer privacy lawsuit, which sought at least $5 billion in damages over allegations that the company tracked users’ data when they thought they were browsing privately.

The lawyers for Google and consumers while appearing before the U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, on Thursday, December 29, 2023, said they had reached a preliminary settlement.

The lawsuit aimed for a minimum of $5 billion in damages. Although the settlement terms remain undisclosed, the legal parties have reached a binding term sheet through mediation. They anticipate presenting a formal settlement for court approval by February 24, 2024.

The plaintiffs claimed that Google’s analytics, cookies, and apps enabled the Alphabet unit to track their activity even when using Google’s Chrome browser in “Incognito” mode or other browsers in “private” browsing mode.

They argued that Google transformed into an “unaccountable trove of information,” allowing the company to gather details about their friends, hobbies, favourite foods, shopping habits, and potentially embarrassing online searches.

According to Information Security Stack Exchange, Google is able to track users in incognito mode if the sites that the user visits have Google’s services installed, such as Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, etc. This is because in Chrome’s incognito windows, scripts like Google Analytics still work and send your browsing behaviour to Google. Firefox however blocks Google Analytics while in private mode.
It is important for Google service users to understand that incognito mode does not provide anonymity or tracking protection. What it does is block the persistence of information across sessions, preventing permanent storage of cookies or history after the browser has been closed. Within a given browsing session, meaning from start to stop, incognito and similar features works exactly the same as a normal browsing session. The difference is that local storage is blocked so all of the session information is gone upon browser termination.
In August 2023, Judge Rogers dismissed Google’s attempt to have the lawsuit thrown out. She raised the question of whether Google had made a legally binding commitment not to collect users’ data during private browsing. The judge referred to Google’s privacy policy and other company statements that hinted at limitations on the information it might collect.
Initiated in 2020, the lawsuit covered “millions” of Google users from June 1, 2016. Each user sought at least $5,000 in damages for violations of federal wiretapping and California privacy laws.
In November 2022, Google introduced a pilot for its user choice billing program in the U.S., allowing developers to utilise alternative payment methods for in-app purchases.