Google agrees to delete the browsing data collected… in incognito mode

Who would have thought that Google still tracked its users in incognito mode? Pretty much everyone, but that should no longer be the case following an agreement to avoid a court ruling.

THE Wall Street Journal revealed an agreement between Google and users of its services after a “class action”. The search engine has thus agreed to delete immense quantities of data collected on its users using incognito mode, which should prevent it from going to court.

The company is also committed to greater transparency and control over the data collected with this mode of navigation.

Google forced to delete data collected with incognito mode

With the agreement that was reached between the company and the plaintiffs, the latter’s lawyers described the incognito mode in its current form as “ a lie in practice “, And ” a problem of professional ethics and basic honesty “. It is true that this navigation mode was until now incognito only in name, and if it does not leave a history in your browser, Google does not forget anything.

But the agreement that was made could change, if not the claimed anonymity, at least the lack of transparency that surrounds it for the moment. Indeed, Google has undertaken to reformulate the notice that is displayed in incognito mode in order to inform users that data is indeed collected when they use this navigation mode. Third-party cookies should also be blocked there by default.

This agreement, which must still be validated by a judge next July, will finally require the firm to “ delete and/or [de] remediate billions of data records »
made in this way.

A long-known problem

When individuals filed a class action in October 2022, they had good reason to be skeptical about the confidentiality displayed by incognito browsing. At that time, internal company conversations, in which employees in charge of this mode openly mocked it, had in fact been made public. In 2018, an engineer wrote in an internal email that “ we need to stop calling it “private browsing” and stop using a spy icon “.

The problem is therefore not really new. A marketing manager had also suggested to Sundar Pichai, the company’s CEO, in 2021, to “make Incognito mode truly private”, among a list of measures she suggested to try to regain public trust after several revelations about the company’s treatment of privacy. For her, the only way to promote it without falling into false advertising was to remain as vague as possible. And it is of course this last approach which was preferred, which did not prevent, last May, several American states from filing complaints against the company precisely for this reason.

It therefore took the threat of justice and yet another fine for incognito mode to come a little closer to what it suggests.

Sources: Gizmodo, The Echo