Google has agreed to destroy billions of data records that were collected by the company secretly.
Updated October 2026. This article was first published in April 2024. We added the settlement’s main terms as reported by Reuters and its approval status; when we checked the public court docket in October 2026, we did not find an order granting final approval.
Google has agreed to restrictions on its ability to track users. The deal comes after a class action lawsuit was filed against Google in the United States in 2020.
The suit alleged that Google had compromised the online privacy of users by collecting records of data when people were browsing in private mode, known as incognito.
The proposed settlement was filed on Monday at an Oakland federal court in California. Meanwhile, it is yet to be approved by US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
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The court filing states that if the judge approves this settlement, then the tech giant must “delete and/or remediate billions of data records” that were obtained from users’ incognito browsing histories.
The Wall Street Journal reported the plaintiff’s lawyer, David Boies, said in the filing,
This settlement is an historic step in requiring dominant technology companies to be honest in their representations to users about how the companies collect and employ user data, and to delete and remediate data collected.
Reuters reported in December last year regarding the claims of complainants. They stated,
Google’s analytics, cookies and apps let the Alphabet unit track their activity even when they set Google’s Chrome browser to “Incognito” mode and other browsers to “private” browsing mode.
A trial on the case was originally scheduled to be held on February 5, 2024. However, it was called off after both sides reached a preliminary settlement in December 2023, whose terms were not disclosed at the time.
The lawsuit sought damages worth at least $5 billion, or $5,000 per user, for alleged violations of federal wiretapping and California privacy laws.
What the settlement includes
According to Reuters, the settlement does not pay damages to users. Instead, Google agreed to delete billions of data records, update its disclosures about what it collects during private browsing, and let Incognito users block third-party cookies for five years. Individual users can still sue Google for damages separately. Plaintiffs’ lawyers valued the settlement at more than $5 billion, and as much as $7.8 billion; that is their own estimate, not a payment.
The settlement needs approval from US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. When we checked the case docket (Brown v. Google LLC, No. 4:20-cv-03664, Northern District of California) in October 2026, we did not find an order granting final approval, and a 2026 filing still referred to the “proposed” settlement. Check the docket for the latest status.
