Google to purge billions of files
Judge orders action in settlement of Chrome privacy case
SAN FRANCISCO — Google has agreed to purge billions of records containing personal information collected from more than 136 million people in the United States surfing the internet through its Chrome web browser.
The massive housecleaning comes as part of a settlement in a lawsuit accusing the search giant of illegal surveillance.
Details emerged in a court filing Monday, more than three months after Google and the attorneys handling the class-action case disclosed they had resolved a June 2020 lawsuit targeting Chrome’s privacy controls.
Allegations in the lawsuit accused Google of tracking Chrome users’ internet activity even when they had switched to the “Incognito” setting supposed to shield them from being shadowed by the Mountain View, California, company.
Google fought the lawsuit until
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected a request to dismiss the case last August, setting up a potential trial. The settlement was negotiated during the next four months, culminating in Monday’s disclosure of the terms, which Rogers must approve during a July 30 hearing in Oakland, California, federal court.
The settlement requires Google to expunge billions of personal records stored in its data centers and make more prominent privacy disclosures about Chrome’s Incognito option. It also imposes other controls designed to limit Google’s collection of personal information.
Consumers represented in the class-action lawsuit won’t receive any damages or any other payments in the settlement.
“We are pleased to settle this lawsuit, which we always believed was meritless,” Google said in a Monday statement. The company asserted it is only being required to “delete old personal technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalization.”
In court papers, the attorneys representing Chrome users painted a different picture, depicting the settlement as a major victory for personal privacy.
The lawyers valued the settlement at $4.75 billion to $7.8 billion, based mainly on calculations of potential ad sales that the personal information collected through Chrome could have generated in the past and future without the new restrictions.
The settlement also doesn’t shield Google from more lawsuits on the same issues covered in the class-action case. That means individual consumers can still pursue damages against the company by filing their own civil complaints in state courts around the U.S.
Investors don’t appear too worried about the settlement terms affecting the digital ad sales that account for most of the over $300 billion in annual revenue pouring into Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc. Shares rose 3 percent to close Monday at $155.49, giving the company a market value of $1.9 trillion.