In May, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Alphabet s Google claiming that the Google search engine still collects data on users who think they can be anonymous if they use a private browsing mode. The lawsuit came about eight months after US District Judge Lucy Koh was disturbed to learn that Google still tracks users in Incognito mode in its Chrome browser.
Australia s competition watchdog said on Friday that Google was ordered by the Australian Federal Court to pay $60 million $42.7 million in penalties for misleading users on the collection of their personal location data.
The Australian Competition Consumer Commission ACCC estimates that 1.3 million Google account users in Australia may have been affected. In a statement by the ACCC, the company said that Google misled users into believing that the location history setting on their Android phones was the only way location data could be collected by it, when a feature to monitor web and applications activity allowed local data collection and storage.
Google is not new to lawsuits. In June 2020, a $5 billion lawsuit was filed against Google in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California for tracking private internet use and violating federal wiretapping and California privacy laws.
The complainants accused Alphabet Inc of gathering information about what people view online and where they browse, despite the fact that Google calls it Incognito mode.
Computer security researchers have long raised concerns that Google and rivals could add user profiles by tracking people's identities across different browsing modes, combining data from private and ordinary internet surfing, while users may view private browsing as a safe haven from watchful eyes.
The proposed class likely includes millions of Google users who have been browsing the internet in private mode since June 1, 2016 according to the complaint. It seeks at least $5,000 in damages per user for violations of federal wiretapping and California privacy laws.