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Google hit with $5 billion lawsuit over tracking private browsing
by Anthony Murdoch, LifeSite News:
The complaint states that Google ‘cannot continue to engage in the covert and unauthorized data collection from virtually every American with a computer or phone.’
SAN FRANCISCO, California, June 3, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – A lawsuit filed Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California seeks at least $5 billion from Google over tracking users’ information even when they are browsing in private mode.
According to Reuters, which has seen the complaint, Google is accused of gathering data “through Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager and other applications and website plug-ins, including smartphone apps, regardless of whether users click on Google-supported ads.”
Those tracking activities, the article indicated, take place in all browsers used in private mode, not only within Google’s own Chrome browser.
Reuters continued, “This helps Google learn about users’ friends, hobbies, favorite foods, shopping habits, and even the ‘most intimate and potentially embarrassing things’ they search for online, the complaint said.”
Google “cannot continue to engage in the covert and unauthorized data collection from virtually every American with a computer or phone.”
The tech giant has been involved in numerous lawsuits over the years, many of which had to do with privacy issues. Wikipedia has dedicated a site solely to “Google litigation.”
Most recently, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, sued Google for setting up its smartphone operating system Android “in a way that enriched its advertising empire and deceived device owners about the protections actually afforded to their personal data,” The Washington Post reported at the end of May.
Google and Apple, which are effectively a duopoly providing the Android and iOS operating systems to almost the entire smartphone market worldwide, used the coronavirus pandemic to jointly develop a basis for future contact tracing apps.
“Together, the tech giants rolled out a COVID-19 exposure notification system, essentially a unified programming interface that will allow public health departments to create their own contact tracing applications,” ABC News reported in May.
“The companies said that digital contact tracing is meant to augment traditional human-to-human tracing, not replace it,” the article continued. “Digital contact tracing is faster than traditional tracing, requires fewer resources and since it doesn’t rely on human memory, can make it easier to track exposure in crowded spaces, or contact with strangers.”
In addition to violating users’ privacy, Google and other tech companies have been condemned for their censorship of divergent statements and opinions, especially in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.
President Donald Trump, in mid-May, called out the “Radical Left” for its influence over various social media based in the United States. “The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google,” Trump tweeted May 16. “The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation.”
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, tech giants like Twitter and YouTube, the latter being part of Google, have implemented a number of new measures they claim are needed to stop the spread of what they consider false information regarding the virus.
Twitter began to attach warning labels to “some tweets containing disputed or misleading information” in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.
“In serving the public conversation, our goal is to make it easy to find credible information on Twitter and to limit the spread of potentially harmful and misleading content,” Twitter said in a statement. The company introduced “new labels and warning messages that will provide additional context and information.”
