Google has agreed to make changes to the Incognito mode on its web browser, as part of a settlement to a lawsuit that alleged that the search engine giant misled users about their data privacy while using the feature. Google will also delete “billions of data records” associated with users’ private browsing history, court documents revealed on Monday.
The class-action lawsuit was originally filed in 2020 in a California federal court and accused Google of failing to properly disclose to users the extent of which their data was being tracked when they used the private browsing mode, Incognito, on the company’s web browser.
According to court documents, employees warned management in 2013 that they needed to “simplify” the Incognito splash page, warning that users could draw “incorrect conclusions” from it.
In 2019, Google’s Chief Marketing Officer Lorraine Twohill emailed Chief Executive Sundar Pichai that Google’s “really fuzzy, hedging language” regarding its Incognito mode “is almost more damaging.”
Google agreed to the settlement in December, however, details of the agreement were disclosed in court documents filed on Monday.
Google will explicitly disclose on its Incognito splash page that it indeed collects data from Incognito users and deletes billions of data records it has already collected, according to the filing. The company will also give users the option to block third-party cookies when they’re using Incognito mode for the next five years.
“This settlement is an historic step in requiring dominant technology companies to be honest in their representations to users about how the companies collect and employ user data, and to delete and remediate data collected,” attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote in the filing.
“We are pleased to settle this lawsuit, which we always believed was meritless,” Google Spokesperson José Castañeda told Quartz in emailed statement.” 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.”