In recent months, Google has struggled to settle a slew of lawsuits ahead of major antitrust battles with the Justice Department later this year.
On Monday, the company settled its fourth case in four months, agreeing to delete billions of data files it collected about millions of Chrome browser users, according to a legal filing. The suit, Chasom Brown, et al. against Google, said the company had misled users by tracking their online activity in Chrome’s incognito mode, which they believed would be private.
Since December, Google has spent well over $1 billion settling lawsuits as it prepares to fight the Justice Department, which has targeted Google’s search engine and advertising business in a pair of lawsuits.
In December, Google settled a lawsuit with dozens of attorneys general who alleged that strong-armed app makers were paying high fees. Six weeks later, the company settled a lawsuit that accused it of improperly sharing users’ personal information from the defunct social networking site Google+. And in March, Google agreed to pay a Massachusetts company, Singular Computing, an undisclosed sum after it was accused of stealing patent designs — an allegation Google denies.
To end the incognito status claims, Google agreed to “rewrite its disclosures to inform users that Google collects private browsing data,” said the settlement, which was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the North District of California. Users can already see the disclosure on the landing page when they open incognito mode.
Google has agreed, for the next five years, to maintain a change to its incognito mode that blocks third-party cookies by default, which limits the number of web users that websites can track.
“This requirement ensures additional privacy for incognito users in the future while limiting the amount of data Google collects from them,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers, led by senior counsel David Boies, said in the filing.
Google will also stop using technology that detects when users turn on private browsing, so it can no longer track users’ choice to use incognito mode. While Google will not pay the plaintiffs as part of the settlement, individuals have the option to sue the company for damages.
Google said in a statement that the lawsuit was without merit.
“The plaintiffs originally wanted $5 billion and are getting zero,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesman. “We are happy to delete old technical data that has never been associated with an individual and has never been used for any form of personalization.”
A trial was scheduled to begin in early February, although the parties said in December that they had agreed to settle.
“The settlement prevents Google from secretly collecting user data worth, according to Google’s own estimates, billions of dollars,” Mr Boies said on Monday.
