Security News > 2020 > June > $5bn+ sueball bounces into Google's court over claims it continues to track netizens in 'private browsing mode'

Google has been sued for billions of dollars in a proposed class action alleging the adtech company identified and tracked users who adopted its browser's incognito mode to avoid such tracking.

The complaint, filed in Northern California yesterday [PDF], claims that through a combination of means ranging from "Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, and various other application and website plug-ins", the adtech company has identified individuals' IP addresses, "What the user is viewing, what the user last viewed, and details about the user's hardware" while they were in incognito mode.

Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesman, told Reuters the company would defend itself vigorously against the claims.

Google has faced, and indeed is currently facing, legal action over similar claims of intentional privacy-busting.

The so-called Safari Workaround is the subject of current legal action in the UK. Sir Geoffrey Vos, a senior judge, described the case as seeking "To call Google to account for its allegedly wholesale and deliberate misuse of personal data without consent, undertaken with a view to commercial profit" in a judgment from last year allowing the case to go ahead. The Safari Workaround itself was a method for Google to plant ad-tracking cookies on the devices of people using Apple's Safari browser.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/06/03/google_lawsuit/