American Military News by Ethan Baron - Mercury News September 04, 2023
A federal court judge this week shot down Google’s attempt to scuttle a multi-billion-dollar class-action lawsuit accusing it of making an Orwellian grab of “potentially embarrassing” data from users’ “Incognito mode” and other private browsing.
The three Californians and two others suing Google on behalf of themselves and tens of millions of other internet users claim Google captured the data despite promising it would not.
Google, in its bid to get the case thrown out, argued in a March court filing that it “never made any such promise.”
In her order in U.S. District Court in Oakland, California, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said she agreed with the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit in 2020 that anyone using Incognito mode in Google’s Chrome browser could reasonably deduce from the mode’s opening “splash” screen that their data would not be accessible by Google. She also noted that Google’s “Search & Browse Privately” help page — for users of Chrome and other browsers including Safari — says, “you’re in control of what you information you share with Google when you search.”
The Mountain View, California, digital-advertising and internet-search giant represented publicly since mid-2016 that “it would not collect their information while they browsed privately,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote. “It did so anyway, collecting, aggregating, and selling plaintiffs’ private browsing data without their consent.”
More:
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2023/09/google-loses-bid-to-toss-lawsuit-over-potentially-embarrassing-incognito-mode-data-grabbing/
