If you’ve been using Google Chrome’s Incognito mode believing that the internet giant wasn’t tracking you, you haven’t been paying attention to American legal proceedings. The search company has offered to delete its store of Incognito data as part of a settlement for an ongoing class-action lawsuit concerning the browser ‘feature’.
The lawsuit was instituted in 2020 by users upset that Incognito didn’t prevent Google from tracking their browsing and other activity while the feature was active. At best it kept data about their activities off their computers, which makes sense since the most recent updates to the function are all about locking it down on the device it’s being used on.
Terror Incognito
The suit complains that this miscommunication has left Google in possession of a vast store of information that it’s not supposed to have. This covers personal data, habits, and other “intimate and potentially embarrassing things” that users are presumably not okay with sharing with a faceless international data company.
Deletion of this data collection is the main step Google is offering in the settlement but other steps are also being taken. Google will be more clear about which data is being collected by its products. Incognito users will also be able to block third-party cookies for five years. No monetary damages await the Big G in this settlement, but individual users are welcome to sue the company.
“The result is that Google will collect less data from users’ private browsing sessions, and that Google will make less money from the data,” said the company’s lawyers.
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda added, “We never associate data with users when they use Incognito mode. 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 implication here is that the technical data collected by the feature was used for some internal purpose at Google. It may or may not have served its purpose but there’s no clarity about what Google products or features have seen a benefit from data users were under the impression was a secret to everyone including Google. Still, the deletion, if approved by a California judge, will mark the end of these legal proceedings for the search giant.