Google agreed to destroy billions of data records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately.

Terms of the settlement were filed on Monday in the Oakland, California, federal court, and require approval by US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs valued the accord at more than $5 billion, and as high as $7.8 billion. Though users will not receive damages, they may still sue individually for damages.

The class action began in 2020, covering millions of Google users who used private browsing since June 1, 2016.

Users alleged that Google’s analytics, cookies and apps let the Alphabet unit improperly track people who set Google’s Chrome browser to “Incognito” mode and other browsers to “private” browsing mode.

They said this turned Google into an “unaccountable trove of information” by letting it learn about their friends, favourite foods, hobbies, shopping habits, and the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” they hunt for online.

Under the settlement, Google will update disclosures about what it collects in “private” browsing, a process it has already begun. It will also let Incognito users block third-party cookies for five years.

“The result is that Google will collect less data from users’ private browsing sessions and that Google will make less money from the data,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote.

Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Telecom company AT&T said on Saturday that a data leak could have affected about 73 million people.

According to court papers, Google supports final approval of the settlement but disagrees with the plaintiffs’ “legal and factual characterisations”.

David Boies, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, in a statement called the settlement “a historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies”.
A preliminary settlement had been reached in December, advertising a scheduled February 5, 2024 trial. Terms were not disclosed at the time.

Microsoft apps

Microsoft will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the US tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.

The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft’s tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack.

Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing.

Rivals, however, said packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on October 1 last year.

“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.