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Google has agreed to destroy billions of data records to settle lawsuits that the company secretly tracked the internet activity of users using incognito web browsing.
Terms of the settlement were filed April 1 in Oakland, California federal court and require approval by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers valued the settlement at more than $5 billion, with some pegging it as high as $7.8 billion. Google will not pay damages, but users can sue the company privately for their own damages.
The class action lawsuit, which began in 2020, covers millions of Google users who have used the incognito browsing feature since June 1, 2016.
Users allege that Google's analytics, cookies and apps services have allowed the company to track people who set Google's Chrome browser to "Incognito" mode and other browsers to "private" browsing modes.
This, the plaintiffs say, has turned Google into an “uncontrolled information warehouse” by allowing the company to learn about users’ friends, favorite foods, hobbies, shopping habits, and “the most secret and potentially embarrassing things.”
Under the settlement, Google will publish updates to the information it collects during users' "private" browsing sessions. Google will also allow Incognito users to block third-party cookies for five years.
Plaintiffs' attorney David Boies said Google will collect less data from users' private browsing sessions and will make less money from that data. He called the settlement "a historic step in demanding honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies."
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said the company was pleased to settle the lawsuit, which it has always considered “meritless.”
The two sides reached a preliminary settlement in December 2023, averting a trial that was scheduled for February 5, 2024. Terms were not disclosed at the time. Plaintiffs' attorneys plan to ask Google to pay unspecified legal fees afterward.
Google has announced it will invest $1 billion in a data center outside London, the latest investment by the tech giant in the UK to meet the growing demand for Internet services in the region.
The data center is located on a 33-acre (13-hectare) site purchased by Google in 2020 in the town of Waltham Cross, about 15 miles north of central London, the Alphabet-owned company said.
The UK government, which is pushing businesses to invest to fund new infrastructure, particularly in growth sectors such as technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI), has described Google's investment as a “major vote of confidence” in the UK.
“Google’s $1 billion investment is testament to the UK’s status as a centre of technological excellence and its huge potential for growth,” said UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
The investment follows Google's $1 billion acquisition of a central London office building in 2022, where it is building a new office and also houses AI company DeepMind.
“This new data centre will help meet the growing demand for cloud and AI services, while providing storage and computing power to businesses across the UK, while also creating construction and engineering jobs,” said Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat.
Google, which employs more than 7,000 people in the UK, also said the waste heat generated from its data centres would be an energy conservation opportunity that could benefit local communities.
Google is currently pushing its AI technology, with ChatGPT’s dominance in the generative AI market undisputed. Google launched Bard, a rather popular response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, users quickly found Bard’s feedback to be limited, inaccurate, and prone to errors. This led to a lot of criticism on social media about Bard’s inferior capabilities compared to its competitors.
With Gemini, Google hopes to address these shortcomings of Bard and end ChatGPT’s market dominance. The company has made some pretty bold claims about Gemini’s capabilities, even suggesting that Gemini will eclipse GPT-4, ChatGPT’s big language model, in every way.
