In 2020, Florida resident William Byatt and California residents Chasom Brown and Maria Nguyen filed the lawsuit against Google. It accuses the tech giant of violating wiretap.
What just happened? Google has agreed to delete browsing data that it collected from Chrome users who were in Incognito mode. The move is part of a settlement in a lawsuit that claims the company tracked people who assumed they were browsing the web privately by going Incognito.
In 2020, Florida resident William Byatt and California residents Chasom Brown and Maria Nguyen filed the lawsuit against Google. It accuses the tech giant of violating wiretap laws and claims that sites using Google Analytics or Ad Manager collected information from browsers in Incognito mode, including web page content, device data, and IP address. Google is also accused of taking Chrome users’ private browsing data and associating it with existing user profiles.
It’s alleged that Google turned this information into an “unaccountable trove of information” that allowed it to learn about Incognito users’ friends, favorite foods, hobbies, shopping habits and the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” they search for and view online.
