Fast facts
- Newly disclosed documents revealed new information about Google's revenue associated with data collection
- This comes as a 2020 lawsuit over incognito data tracking forces the company to stop tracking for five years.
- To seek monetary damages, members of the class covered by the lawsuit must sue Google individually.
Browsing in incognito mode on Alphabet's Google (GOOG) It made many feel as if they were using the web privately—that is, until the truth about user data finally became public.
In 2020, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Google in federal court in California, alleging that the search, advertising, and cloud services giant was tracking users' data in private browsing mode.
The lawsuit claimed that the practice revealed the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” people search for online, turning Google into an “inexplicable trove of information.”
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Four years later, Google agreed to destroy the billions of data records it obtained in this way as part of the lawsuit settlement. Although the plaintiffs were asking for $5 billion, Google does not pay damages, but users can sue the company individually.
However, new information has emerged about why Alphabet did what it did.
Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint shared a tweet on the evening of April 1, pointing out some fascinating information he found in the newly revealed lawsuit documents: the enormous amount of money Google will lose by being forced to stop collect user data in incognito mode.
“Wow. Super interesting data on the impact on Google's revenue of blocking third-party cookies (aka privacy)… connection points. Left: Google's redacted estimate of the impact of blocking third-party tracking cookies in Chrome's private mode (aka Incognito). Right: Open today,” Kint writes.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet”>
Wow. A very interesting fact about the impact on Google's revenue of blocking third-party cookies (aka privacy)…connecting the dots.
Left: Google's redacted estimate of the impact of blocking third-party tracking cookies in Chrome's private mode (aka incognito).
Right: open today. pic.twitter.com/B1SBG2PlJg
-Jason Kint (@jason_kint) twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1774927372359221711?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>April 1, 2024
Kint highlights a point raised in the settlement: “(Blocking) data tagged with Google's own 'third-party cookies' in incognito mode already results in Google losing nearly $500 million a year in global annual revenue.”
The agreement, filed in federal court in San Francisco, says Google supports the settlement but “disagrees with the legal and factual characterizations contained in the motion.”
Google spokesman José Castañeda told The Wall Street Journal that the individual lawsuits arising from the matter were “baseless.”
He told the newspaper that the company agreed to delete “old technical data.” He said the information was never associated with an individual or used for any type of personalization.
The Journal reported that the deal requires final approval from a federal judge.
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