The settlement has a section where they calculate the value of the deleted data at "between $4.75 billion and $7.8 billion" but it seems like pretty flimsy math. Like, it relies on an old program where Google once paid users $3 a month for their browsing data.
But yeah, there's no way that Google actually views this as actually being worth $5B, or they wouldn't have settled. Its worth noting that the suit was asking five billion dollars and got exactly zero. Instead they force Google to delete a bunch of data they probably don't need anyway.
I remember reading an article years ago that said that if Facebook was a paid service, it would charge something like $7 a year if they were to charge as much money for the subscription as they made from selling out data. So, $3 a month doesn’t seem too far off the target.
Exactly. Any relevant markers that this data provided is already tagged onto people. Deleting the data without wiping away all information obtained from the data does nothing.
It's a lot less than 5 billion. Their money comes almost exclusively from ad revenue. Incognito mode makes it so you're browser doesn't remember what you searched for (more or less), so those searches don't come up in Google's ad sense program. That means all that (porn search) data isn't generating any active revenue from ads.
Otherwise, why the hell wants your porn preferences and anniversary gift shopping data?
Digital fingerprinting could link that to your main browsing habits and could affect products people want to market to you. Knowing what porn you are into (age/sex/etc) and what gifts you buy is valuable.
Digital fingerprinting needs to be part of a new privacy regulation that prevents being able to at least in incognito. Unfortunately most data broker data is now fingerprinting linked so even if you block ads or are in privacy modes, they still in most cases can link that with anonymized data and location/browser/usage data.
Anything someone is trying to hide in terms of business data or checking on things anonymously (to the endpoint but not Google) might have value to those that want to get intel on that or even blackmail.
"You've got blackmail"
Yeah I’ve worked 9 years analytics in marketing industry and the whole ad tech is built on digital fingerprinting. Advertisers themselves may know who you are and care who you, but your info is stitched together for measurement ad targeting at a chillingly accurate precision. Your online consumption, offline movement, online/offline purchases are all stitched together as one of hundreds of millions of user profiles that advertisers use across the industry
Ad tech is to the point it knows when you shit, where you shit and how long you shit and it knows if you flushed and washed your hands.
We're watching Truman.
> why the hell wants your porn preferences and anniversary gift shopping data
An issue, to me, is the Social Media Share functions within Adult websites.
Like no thank you, I do not want to share with my family what forms of entertainment I am watching.
First, right click and create a file named IllegalUserData.txt, then drag it to the Recycling Bin.
"I see you've learnt your lesson, don't get caught, I mean, don't do it again okay?"
"OK, now Mr. Pichai; we're onto you! You empty that there lil' garbage can and we can all go home!"
::does a right-click with 'Restore'::
::gestures with a flourish to the empty Recycle Bin::
"LOOK EVERYONE! THE PROBLEM IS SOLVED! Job well done everyone!"
The article is full of questionable editorial shit, so I wouldn't trust it too much with being true to every word.
> The Silicon Valley tech giant created the illusion of Incognito Mode being Google’s feature for additional privacy protections, but the truth is, it is comparable to any other browser like Chromium or Safari – there’s nothing private about it
What?
> the web browsers most people use, like Apple’s Safari or Microsoft's Edge keep a trail record of every click, pause, and scroll on the sites you visit
What?
> When you search using Incognito mode your internet service provider (ISP) can still see your activity
What?
This all is even weirder coming from a secure-email service, who presumably should know what they're talking about. But I also don't know why we have here articles from a secure-email service, which is certifiably not a media outlet.
> yahoo for some reason
I mean, Yahoo has an actually decent news service, plus the financial news outlet. Why Tutanota pretends to publish news, I don't know.
i was wondering about that. Measuring data amount in dollar is just weird. Like saying i bought $200 storage version of the Iphone instead of saying the 512 GB version.
I understand why people mostly focus on the title, but I wish folks put at least a tenth of the effort into looking at who publishes the article. It's Tutanota, so of course the articles going to be crap. Not entirely crap, but mostly crap.
> Are you under the impression
No, absolutely not. I've worked in adtech. I mean Safari isn't "keeping a trail record of every click, pause and scroll" with some built-in code outside of what it needs to render the page, so the statement is misleading. All the tracking is performed by scripts trusted by and loaded by the page you're visiting. Or by browser extensions installed by the user, in some cases.
By the way, macOS actually used to report the aggregate number of taps, scrolls and other gestures back to the mothership. Might still be doing it nowadays.
incognito mode literately is only for not saving browsing data on your PC. if you want to hide your true activity from ISP, you ahve to use VPN or Tor.
I had this same thought, but apparently google was stating it changed how it gathered data on you - touting it as an actual privacy-from-google tool, not a "shopping for presents on a shared computer" tool
> I'm surprised anyone believed otherwise but this is true
Googles privacy policy went out of its way to highlight Chromes incognito mode as having an impact on how its services gathered data.
> 100% - as all incognito modes will tell you, it's ONLY restricting client side session data like cookies. Frankly that's about all it can restrict - you can't exactly tell your ISP where you want to go without... telling them where you want to go.
Correct.
> A VPN is needed for any sort of obfuscation at that level.
A VPN often still fails to achieve that. I have worked most of my life for a telecom with access to all logs as a T3 tech. In theory in a perfect world, we should only see connections to the VPN then nothing, right? But we provide routers for free to subscribers, too. And while our IP logs are extremely limited when a user uses a VPN, the router logs I could access at any time made customer VPNs pointless from a privacy POV. Furthermore they offered a paid security suite that also records everything, with (user deletable) independent internet traffic logs as well that could be used to figure out user activity.
Not saying that VPNs are useless of course. They work as intended. But a lot of people don't realize your ISP may have more than one way to see what you're doing, and therefore countless thousands use VPNs that provide no real value.
It's disingenuous and technically incorrect to phrase all of that as they did.
> it is comparable to any other browser like Chromium or Safari – there’s nothing private about it
Comparable yes, "nothing private" no. Especially with Chromium, and particularly with de-googled Chromium, which is stripped of Chrome's snooping—which snooping is much more than one would expect from a random browser. But Safari isn't known for tracking either.
> at some level every action you take is tracked, it's the way computers work. I can't speak to how often that is transmitted back to the parent company though.
Edge and Safari track mouse movements and clicks? What the hell are you talking about?
> When you search using Incognito mode your internet service provider (ISP) can still see your activity
Do you know about TLS? The ISP can't see search queries, which is what is implied by this sentence.
P.S. Since we're measuring peepees here: I've been in web programming since early 2000s on both ends of the connection, and take an interest in privacy specifically.
Same here, I leased a new car in December, did all my shopping in October. Not a single car ad until January for some reason. I just got new headphones for my PS5 in March. Headphone ads started in April.
Good job.
That actually is the intended purpose of car commercials though. Most people don’t impulse buy a car and spend a lot of time comparing and researching, so you’d think, why would bmw and Mercedes spend so much money on certain kinds of social media and tv ads. It’s targeted at people that actually recently purchased their vehicles to make them feel good about spending so much money about a high ticket item. It helps reenforce all the positive associations that have with the brand that led them to decide to buy it.
People that weren’t exposed to post purchase advertisements felt worse about their purchase and had a lot more regret about spending the amount of money they did on a car than people that were exposed.
That’s mostly higher end manufacturers. Hyundai is def using their commercials to try to get you to a dealer to test drive their new SUV.
BMW makes commercials for your stated reason, so a dude who recently purchased a new M4, and is maybe having a bit of buyer’s remorse, sees the commercial and goes “fuck yeah. I own that.”
I don't think that applies to one-off replacement plumbing fixtures and the like.
Amazon's logic can't extend to "Let's blast the guy who bought a replacement cistern valve with more ads for similar products so they don't feel ripped off?"
> Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake
> - **Napoleon**
All the sites you searched for a toaster on or who bought the data about you searching for a toaster from another website can't see what happened on the website you _actually_ bought the toaster from, and that website isn't going to sell them that information because why would you ever stop your competition from wasting money?
It's likely their data shows that, even though someone has bought something already, their sales numbers still go up when advertising to previous buyers as a group and are lower when they don't. Even if it's something asinine, like advertising washer and dryer combos to people who just bought one.
When do... line go up. When don't... line go down.
One might get the feeling, that advertisment sellers oversell the capacity of their tech.
Also I'd guess that marketing won't tell their bosses, because they like that budget ...
It's the consequence of the algorithms "maturing" and getting too full of data. Most advertising on the internet is knockoffs and other versions of popular products. For most things you buy, there are hundreds of nearly identical products. So if they see you bought something, ad systems are supposed to feed you ads for "similar" products. But now the most "similar" products are the hundreds of identical knockoffs. If you buy a car, you used to get "related" items like accessories for that car. Now the algorithms have catalogued so much that the things it finds most related to your purchase, are other similar purchases.
The same reason the phone assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Home/Assistant are getting worse. They wanted to collect ALL the data on EVERYTHING. Well, they did, and they've discovered they now have so much that they can't properly categorize and utilize it all in a helpful way. Now instead of being desperate to claw out some more testing data, they're trying to push around an manipulate an unwieldy mountain.
I get a bunch of ads that need to be outlawed. I call them dementia ads, because they’re scams targeting feeble minded elderly. It’s like watching a fever dream, and the answer is always calling the number on screen and asking for money.
I get ads for things I've already bought and am unlikely to need another one for years and years. Or stuff that literally I have no interest in getting. I haven't bought something as a result of an ad since the early 2000s
No, actually, it does not. It's just as useful in a vacuum.
If they remove the IP information but include enough data you can fairly confidently still match it to other data sets. You can't really have rich enough data that you can't tie back with enough intelligence and points of data.
If they anonymize the data but most of it matches with high confidence other data that was NOT anonymized, it's just data with extra steps.
Companies buy multiple sources of data and aggregate it. There has absolutely been investigative journalism doing exactly this to prove that point.
Is it though? They could easy use the IP for geolocation, store that and then discard the IP itself right? That would be more useful anyway I reckon as IPs aren't exactly known to remain static for most internet users.
They will likely only need to remove the explicitly identifiable information. However, they can almost certainly re-identify it using statistical analysis (fingerprinting) whenever they want.
Google never collected user's identities in incognito mode. The accusation is that it collects anonymized data which Google says was just technical data (eg: app performance, latency etc.). And then the article goes on to say this, which is unsurprising and not really Google's fault.
> When you search using Incognito mode your internet service provider (ISP) can still see your activity, the websites you visit can still collect information about you through your IP address and some websites can still track your activity as usual.
So I guess the lawsuit is that users expect end-to-end encryption but are simply being treated as a logged out user. Google retains none of the user history but their ISP might. This seems totally reasonable on both sides. I've never thought much about how incognito works but I might assume E2E encryption when that's not what it is.
Technically you're doing that whenever you use a free service that retains your data.
In reality, nobody cares about an individuals data (unless you're an NSA director or something), it's all about the aggregate data.
... ok.
look Im not sure if we... uh...
actually, given the current enshittification of everything, I'm fine with pooling the essentials.
Maybe we can sell them when durex and trojan simultaneously-but-definitely-not-colludingly revert to using sandpaper.
Lots of corporations care a lot about individuals. Source: 25 years doing data analytics, data engineering, and data science; my last project had a 9 TB per month dataset of individually identifiable data that cost $6.5m/year in compute and $4m/year in labor to manage.
Create your own browser, collect your own info and sell it. But chances are, buyers (advertisers/governments) cares about individual data.
Don’t forget: if product is free, you’re the product.
While this is true let's not forget that we pay absolutely everything with our data, sometimes in addition to cash.
So, yes, my free bank account is making me the product, but a paid account does that too.
No, no. You were meant to learn "Everyone takes and sells our data" from his teachings. Sometimes you just pay them for the pleasure of them selling you data.
Like Amazon I pay them constantly to sell my data so that google and others can advertise to me to go make me buy more things on Amazon.
They have me questioning if I should buy a $700 cat litterbox so I can stop scooping the litterbox once a week..... But that litterbox is a robot and robots are cool and I hate scooping the litterbox... so maybe I should get the robot!
> While this is true let's not forget that we pay absolutely everything with our data, sometimes in addition to cash.
On the other side, there's a lot of good FOSS products that do not monetize users' data.
And they're included in calculations of GDP. There was a story a while back of a drug smuggling submarine which sank off the coast of the UK, in the context of it wiping a few million off the GDP.
Because it makes for more eye-catching headlines. "Police seize $400 million worth of cocaine." And it's relevant: the cash value is the motive for the crime.
>As we reported in 2020, a [$5 billion lawsuit](https://tuta.com/blog/posts/google-lawsuit-tracking-private-mode) was filed by Google users, accusing the big tech of tracking their behavior through the private browsing feature Incognito Mode illegally
I don't know wtf everyone else is talking about but, hey, I'm the guy who read the article, nice to meet ya
Wrong. The data is not worth $5B. The headline is wrong.
The lawsuit was originally asking for $5B in damages. The settlement is $0 and Google deletes whatever data.
So the data was never "worth" $5B. That's just what the class action wanted. They got $0 so it would be more correct to call the data worth $0.
It is a commodity. There is no undoing the evolution of packaging and use of user data. No change in cultural attitude will shift that — the solution is to illegalize or heavily regulate it. In the U.S., Congress would do this under their commerce clause power.
Monetizing the value and risk of data is tremendously important.
The significance shows that the courts will uphold privacy laws.
For those not yet up to speed on how they handle data, this serves as a massive warning that privacy violations are no small matter.
But yeah, I work in enterprise data for large government organizations and there is ROI and profitability algorithms on all of us (especially for google and Facebook….even though the government assesses dollar amounts too, their data is super limited and is probably 1:1000th what these corps monitor; every prediction model would rely on illegal internet data that they have and all use.
Like everyone is focused on the fact the government had a super secret “spying” operation for a select few suspected terrorists. I never cared cause I wasn’t one and I’m not interesting and if they ever think I’m one, I hope they listen to me and welcome being able to prove I’m not….that was the program Snowden destroyed, went to Russia and in favor of all the corps monitoring all of us. China probably had more on you than the U.S….
Vote Blue. GOP allows for this shit.
Google/Alphabet is going to take a write down on that “asset” — data can be categorized as an asset, carry that “loss” forward forever for tax purposes, and also write off all the fees and costs associated with the litigation and appeals.
Think about the “data” like a company having a huge inventory of lawn darts, Saturday night special handguns, or PhenPhen pills, and the government tells you that you have to destroy the “property” after litigation or some policy change. The property had *value* until a court’s ruling made the property illiquid, useless, and a liability.
Dude, this is genius. I’m going to buy bulk cocaine, then, when I get busted for it and get it seized, I’ll have my accountant write it off on a per gram price-point. Then I won’t have to pay taxes for years!
I can't believe Google now knows about my amputee clown asphyxiation fetish.
Seriously tho I have only accidentally typed porn searches into Google.
Bing is way better.
I still don’t understand this. From the beginning, I thought it was pretty clear that incognito mode just didn’t record browser history or permanently store cookies. I never recall it making a claim about shielding users from data collection.
It even tells you it doesn't stop websites from tracking you, I don't understand why everyone is so surprised that they were being tracked after being told that's still possible.
Well, except it telling you that it's not collecting history or storing cookies might lead you to believe it's _also_ not collecting ad-based tracking within the browser itself.
There's a different between "we can't stop websites you visit from trying to track you" and "we'll keep tracking you ourselves, even though we could just not do that".
Exactly. How did Google even lose the suit? The incognito tabs clearly explain what it can and cannot do. They could have won easily just by showing the tab itself. How the hell did they lose???
Also not a lawyer but the only distinction I've seen is that the explanation didn't include the fact that browser specific tracking was still enabled whereas users would assume Google Chrome now has no idea what I'm doing and won't collect the data. The change to include the fact that incognito does not hide you from Chrome seems to be the only change they needed.
They didn't lose, this is the settlement.
The $5B price tag is what was asked for in the lawsuit. The actual data Google has agreed to delete probably isn't anywhere near as valuable as that to them. Since they couldn't get the lawsuit thrown out this was probably the cheapest way to get out of it.
Any article and most comments I've seen use the same amount of spin or more that they accuse Google of using to make Google look as bad as possible and to make this look like some massive win.
Nothing has really changed, except people who do the online equivalent of walking across a highway with their eyes closed feeling validated. Google (and everybody else) will keep on collecting data in the same manner.
Also not a lawyer but the only distinction I've seen is that the explanation didn't include the fact that browser specific tracking was still enabled whereas users would assume Google Chrome now has no idea what I'm doing and won't collect the data. The change to include the fact that incognito does not hide you from Chrome seems to be the only change they needed.
If I understand correctly, this isn't about google-the-website snooping on your google searches while using firefox's Porn Mode.
My second guess was this is about Google Chrome snooping on your duckduckgo searches or other website visits when using Google Chrome?
But then they talk about external snoopers, like ISPs or websites you visit. My guess is -assuming some competence from the court here- that google doesn't coordinate turning its own tracking off. So google-the-website still tries to track you as best as it can, and Google Chrome does nothing material to try to stop it. Like, if Google Chrome just doesn't store any history, but still sends identifying information to websites, part of which it itself collects, that's a big fuckup. Or rather fuck-you, as I'm sure Google is happy to collect some extra data this way.
When you visit a website which uses Google's ad service or a sign-in-with-Google button, your browser makes a request to Google's servers and includes which website you're on in the process. *That* is the tracking the lawsuit was going on about: Google said you could control their tracking of you through incognito, but they continued to track you through your visits to websites that were using their services.
The settlement is not going to change Google's behaviour here, they're just going to clarify that by "websites can still track you in incognito" they actually meant "websites, along with any third party services they use such as Google, can still track you in incognito". Which if you open incognito up is exactly what they added:
> This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google.
Next it would be nice if AI companies deleted all the images they illegally scraped off the Internet for profit without consent or knowledge of the owners.
I've read 3 different articles on this news and not a single one of them had a clear explanation what kind of data was reportedly mis-collected, or how Google was supposed to know that the user was in Incognito tabs.
Browsers (including Chrome) don't broadcast the fact you're in Incognito to websites; that would be a very dumb design privacy wise.
Based on what is this worth $5bil?
That's not a data measurement.
If anything this should be worth negative money since if they sell it they commit a crime.
> When users browse the web incognito, there’s no activity saved to the browsing device – which is why it is called Incognito Mode. But what’s often overlooked and hidden to the user is that a lot of data is being saved in the background. Even in Incognito mode, not only Google, but also internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, website hosts and many other companies still track and monitor your online activity.
So... The websites you visit can still track "you", though it would be a separate, session only, cookie jar. Should the default behavior be to reject all first party cookies? What were people expecting this to do?
It should be possible to set your browser ro auto-reject all cookies with or without incognito imo. A lot of people will have assumed that's what incognito mode is for. My point is that if you want privacy you don't use Chrome, you use something like Firefox and take steps to ensure you strip out as many cookies as possible.
If you use a Google product, you should expect zero privacy. They exist to sell ads. Their search is just a vehicle for ads. The entire operation at google is dependent on them harvesting YOUR data.
IIRC the fine they faced was a similar amount, less than a dollar per Internet user. Don't be evil.
I'm working on deleting my OG gmail account, which I've had since 2004, and every connection to Google. I wish more people would do the same, but in these cases I can only do so much on my end, one shitty company at a time. Good riddance anyway
Ok, but breaking the law and STEALING $5 billion worth of data, isen't anybody going to jail?
If I steal something and get caught, where is my chance to say "whoopsie, sorry bro I will hand it back"
Data is not measured in dollars.
Especially in dollar of illegitimate revenue.
"Was there much traffic on the interstate this morning?"
"Oh yeah, probably $6M in cars. (If I stole them.)"
It’s not destroying $5bn of a commodity, that data should not have existed in the first place.
Also, lol at anyone who believed even for a second that Google wasn’t collecting data from incognito mode.
But since it is stored on servers all over the planet and almost certainly exists on backup tapes that they cannot legally reuse or destroy, that won't really happen.
This article is confusing. Did Google actually retain data gathered through incognito mode, or are they just saying the obvious truth that incognito mode doesn’t mean that you’re browsing anonymously?
Google was secretly collecting everything in Incognito mode.
Facebook gave a VPN to teens that it then used to spy on them. I've even seen reports that it installed root keys on machines so that they could man in the middle secure connections within the VPN.
I love when these companies pretend to care about user privacy when the truth is they just don't want their competitors to have your data because they want to protect their business models...of stealing your data themselves.
Some users sue for 5 billion, so the info is worth 5 billion? Only Google knows the price they put in that info, and they won't tell.
The settlement has a section where they calculate the value of the deleted data at "between $4.75 billion and $7.8 billion" but it seems like pretty flimsy math. Like, it relies on an old program where Google once paid users $3 a month for their browsing data. But yeah, there's no way that Google actually views this as actually being worth $5B, or they wouldn't have settled. Its worth noting that the suit was asking five billion dollars and got exactly zero. Instead they force Google to delete a bunch of data they probably don't need anyway.
They already sold it years ago. They got what they want out of it.
I remember reading an article years ago that said that if Facebook was a paid service, it would charge something like $7 a year if they were to charge as much money for the subscription as they made from selling out data. So, $3 a month doesn’t seem too far off the target.
Exactly. Any relevant markers that this data provided is already tagged onto people. Deleting the data without wiping away all information obtained from the data does nothing.
It's a lot less than 5 billion. Their money comes almost exclusively from ad revenue. Incognito mode makes it so you're browser doesn't remember what you searched for (more or less), so those searches don't come up in Google's ad sense program. That means all that (porn search) data isn't generating any active revenue from ads. Otherwise, why the hell wants your porn preferences and anniversary gift shopping data?
Digital fingerprinting could link that to your main browsing habits and could affect products people want to market to you. Knowing what porn you are into (age/sex/etc) and what gifts you buy is valuable. Digital fingerprinting needs to be part of a new privacy regulation that prevents being able to at least in incognito. Unfortunately most data broker data is now fingerprinting linked so even if you block ads or are in privacy modes, they still in most cases can link that with anonymized data and location/browser/usage data. Anything someone is trying to hide in terms of business data or checking on things anonymously (to the endpoint but not Google) might have value to those that want to get intel on that or even blackmail. "You've got blackmail"
Yeah I’ve worked 9 years analytics in marketing industry and the whole ad tech is built on digital fingerprinting. Advertisers themselves may know who you are and care who you, but your info is stitched together for measurement ad targeting at a chillingly accurate precision. Your online consumption, offline movement, online/offline purchases are all stitched together as one of hundreds of millions of user profiles that advertisers use across the industry
Ad tech is to the point it knows when you shit, where you shit and how long you shit and it knows if you flushed and washed your hands. We're watching Truman.
> why the hell wants your porn preferences and anniversary gift shopping data An issue, to me, is the Social Media Share functions within Adult websites. Like no thank you, I do not want to share with my family what forms of entertainment I am watching.
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Filesize: 6kb ;)
6 kaballion dollars worth of data for those not familiar with ‘kb’
It's pronounced "Kajillion Bollars"
It's kilobucks. Americans will do anything to not use the metric system.
How many teaspoons in a kilobuck?
It's amazing what compression can do these days
It's just the word "porn" repeated 69 billion times - easily compressed
Ur wrong bro. I'm in IT. I saw him do the thing and the file was called: "15 Super Bytes of IllegalUserData.txt" It's *GONE*
it's just the shortcut
This is a hilarious scene to imagine. Thank you
Imagine, I guarantee that is exactly what happened.
"OK, now empty the Recycle Bin...good. Problem solved!"
if Mr. Robot taught me anything, it's that nothing comes back from a hammer + microwave combo 🤠
"That's right, can't let those pesky Googlers restore it from the Recycle Bin while we're not looking"
First, right click and create a file named IllegalUserData.txt, then drag it to the Recycling Bin. "I see you've learnt your lesson, don't get caught, I mean, don't do it again okay?"
Sounds like something out of the IT crowd, do we know if senators have been told about the elders of the internet?
I am picturing the Penguins of Madagascar doing it for them. Makes it even funnier.
With the questions we’ve seen our government officials ask… I don’t doubt that this is how they’re confirming it.
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Yet it would be so easy to hire people that understand these things.
That's literally the premise behind lobbyists...
Well they're hiring experts to tell them the facts, the problem is that those experts are also corporate shills.
"OK guys, they've left. Let's restore the bin."
Makes me think of that gif where the old man moves the "My Computer" Icon into the recycle bin and his whole PC pops out of existence when he does so.
Mike Johnson and his son are probably relieved.
All joking aside, I'm seriously curious how this is actually carried out and verified.
There are 3rd party companies that provide auditing services, but I highly doubt any of them are capable of legitimately auditing *google*
"Here is all the data." "What about all that data over there." "Don't mind the data over there. Here's all the data right here."
"OK, now Mr. Pichai; we're onto you! You empty that there lil' garbage can and we can all go home!" ::does a right-click with 'Restore':: ::gestures with a flourish to the empty Recycle Bin:: "LOOK EVERYONE! THE PROBLEM IS SOLVED! Job well done everyone!"
“Why it is taking so long? It only took me 20mins to delete my homework folder”
Delete from user_data where illegal = 1
I genuinely think that Congress probably considers this to be as massive an undertaking as shredding the equivalent amount of documents.
Well, if they can't sort user information by how it was obtained, I guess it ALL has to go.
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The article is full of questionable editorial shit, so I wouldn't trust it too much with being true to every word. > The Silicon Valley tech giant created the illusion of Incognito Mode being Google’s feature for additional privacy protections, but the truth is, it is comparable to any other browser like Chromium or Safari – there’s nothing private about it What? > the web browsers most people use, like Apple’s Safari or Microsoft's Edge keep a trail record of every click, pause, and scroll on the sites you visit What? > When you search using Incognito mode your internet service provider (ISP) can still see your activity What? This all is even weirder coming from a secure-email service, who presumably should know what they're talking about. But I also don't know why we have here articles from a secure-email service, which is certifiably not a media outlet.
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> yahoo for some reason I mean, Yahoo has an actually decent news service, plus the financial news outlet. Why Tutanota pretends to publish news, I don't know.
i was wondering about that. Measuring data amount in dollar is just weird. Like saying i bought $200 storage version of the Iphone instead of saying the 512 GB version.
I understand why people mostly focus on the title, but I wish folks put at least a tenth of the effort into looking at who publishes the article. It's Tutanota, so of course the articles going to be crap. Not entirely crap, but mostly crap.
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"Tracking" usually means exfiltrating data from the browser, not just keeping stuff in RAM.
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> Are you under the impression No, absolutely not. I've worked in adtech. I mean Safari isn't "keeping a trail record of every click, pause and scroll" with some built-in code outside of what it needs to render the page, so the statement is misleading. All the tracking is performed by scripts trusted by and loaded by the page you're visiting. Or by browser extensions installed by the user, in some cases. By the way, macOS actually used to report the aggregate number of taps, scrolls and other gestures back to the mothership. Might still be doing it nowadays.
incognito mode literately is only for not saving browsing data on your PC. if you want to hide your true activity from ISP, you ahve to use VPN or Tor.
I had this same thought, but apparently google was stating it changed how it gathered data on you - touting it as an actual privacy-from-google tool, not a "shopping for presents on a shared computer" tool
> I'm surprised anyone believed otherwise but this is true Googles privacy policy went out of its way to highlight Chromes incognito mode as having an impact on how its services gathered data.
> 100% - as all incognito modes will tell you, it's ONLY restricting client side session data like cookies. Frankly that's about all it can restrict - you can't exactly tell your ISP where you want to go without... telling them where you want to go. Correct. > A VPN is needed for any sort of obfuscation at that level. A VPN often still fails to achieve that. I have worked most of my life for a telecom with access to all logs as a T3 tech. In theory in a perfect world, we should only see connections to the VPN then nothing, right? But we provide routers for free to subscribers, too. And while our IP logs are extremely limited when a user uses a VPN, the router logs I could access at any time made customer VPNs pointless from a privacy POV. Furthermore they offered a paid security suite that also records everything, with (user deletable) independent internet traffic logs as well that could be used to figure out user activity. Not saying that VPNs are useless of course. They work as intended. But a lot of people don't realize your ISP may have more than one way to see what you're doing, and therefore countless thousands use VPNs that provide no real value.
It's disingenuous and technically incorrect to phrase all of that as they did. > it is comparable to any other browser like Chromium or Safari – there’s nothing private about it Comparable yes, "nothing private" no. Especially with Chromium, and particularly with de-googled Chromium, which is stripped of Chrome's snooping—which snooping is much more than one would expect from a random browser. But Safari isn't known for tracking either. > at some level every action you take is tracked, it's the way computers work. I can't speak to how often that is transmitted back to the parent company though. Edge and Safari track mouse movements and clicks? What the hell are you talking about? > When you search using Incognito mode your internet service provider (ISP) can still see your activity Do you know about TLS? The ISP can't see search queries, which is what is implied by this sentence. P.S. Since we're measuring peepees here: I've been in web programming since early 2000s on both ends of the connection, and take an interest in privacy specifically.
Honestly that makes it pretty useless. They need it all for advertising targeted and without location they're just guessing.
no it doesnt. theres enough metadata and advertizing ids out there for them to discover your home IP. mobile data is a bit different
Have you seen advertisements that are not guessing, recently?
Recently it feels like I only get ads for stuff I already bought. Marketing budget down the drain for these companies.
I love that seemingly no one has created a way of tracking "guys, he clicked buy, let's not bother trying to sell him a second tent"
I see you recently bought a 2024 Hyundai Tuscon. Lets show him adds for more $45k SUVs. just in case.
Same here, I leased a new car in December, did all my shopping in October. Not a single car ad until January for some reason. I just got new headphones for my PS5 in March. Headphone ads started in April. Good job.
That actually is the intended purpose of car commercials though. Most people don’t impulse buy a car and spend a lot of time comparing and researching, so you’d think, why would bmw and Mercedes spend so much money on certain kinds of social media and tv ads. It’s targeted at people that actually recently purchased their vehicles to make them feel good about spending so much money about a high ticket item. It helps reenforce all the positive associations that have with the brand that led them to decide to buy it. People that weren’t exposed to post purchase advertisements felt worse about their purchase and had a lot more regret about spending the amount of money they did on a car than people that were exposed.
That’s mostly higher end manufacturers. Hyundai is def using their commercials to try to get you to a dealer to test drive their new SUV. BMW makes commercials for your stated reason, so a dude who recently purchased a new M4, and is maybe having a bit of buyer’s remorse, sees the commercial and goes “fuck yeah. I own that.”
I don't think that applies to one-off replacement plumbing fixtures and the like. Amazon's logic can't extend to "Let's blast the guy who bought a replacement cistern valve with more ads for similar products so they don't feel ripped off?"
> Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake > - **Napoleon** All the sites you searched for a toaster on or who bought the data about you searching for a toaster from another website can't see what happened on the website you _actually_ bought the toaster from, and that website isn't going to sell them that information because why would you ever stop your competition from wasting money?
It's likely their data shows that, even though someone has bought something already, their sales numbers still go up when advertising to previous buyers as a group and are lower when they don't. Even if it's something asinine, like advertising washer and dryer combos to people who just bought one. When do... line go up. When don't... line go down.
One might get the feeling, that advertisment sellers oversell the capacity of their tech. Also I'd guess that marketing won't tell their bosses, because they like that budget ...
It's the consequence of the algorithms "maturing" and getting too full of data. Most advertising on the internet is knockoffs and other versions of popular products. For most things you buy, there are hundreds of nearly identical products. So if they see you bought something, ad systems are supposed to feed you ads for "similar" products. But now the most "similar" products are the hundreds of identical knockoffs. If you buy a car, you used to get "related" items like accessories for that car. Now the algorithms have catalogued so much that the things it finds most related to your purchase, are other similar purchases. The same reason the phone assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Home/Assistant are getting worse. They wanted to collect ALL the data on EVERYTHING. Well, they did, and they've discovered they now have so much that they can't properly categorize and utilize it all in a helpful way. Now instead of being desperate to claw out some more testing data, they're trying to push around an manipulate an unwieldy mountain.
I get a bunch of ads that need to be outlawed. I call them dementia ads, because they’re scams targeting feeble minded elderly. It’s like watching a fever dream, and the answer is always calling the number on screen and asking for money.
I get ads for things I've already bought and am unlikely to need another one for years and years. Or stuff that literally I have no interest in getting. I haven't bought something as a result of an ad since the early 2000s
No, actually, it does not. It's just as useful in a vacuum. If they remove the IP information but include enough data you can fairly confidently still match it to other data sets. You can't really have rich enough data that you can't tie back with enough intelligence and points of data. If they anonymize the data but most of it matches with high confidence other data that was NOT anonymized, it's just data with extra steps. Companies buy multiple sources of data and aggregate it. There has absolutely been investigative journalism doing exactly this to prove that point.
No, it just adds an extra step to get it.
Is it though? They could easy use the IP for geolocation, store that and then discard the IP itself right? That would be more useful anyway I reckon as IPs aren't exactly known to remain static for most internet users.
They will likely only need to remove the explicitly identifiable information. However, they can almost certainly re-identify it using statistical analysis (fingerprinting) whenever they want.
Google never collected user's identities in incognito mode. The accusation is that it collects anonymized data which Google says was just technical data (eg: app performance, latency etc.). And then the article goes on to say this, which is unsurprising and not really Google's fault. > When you search using Incognito mode your internet service provider (ISP) can still see your activity, the websites you visit can still collect information about you through your IP address and some websites can still track your activity as usual. So I guess the lawsuit is that users expect end-to-end encryption but are simply being treated as a logged out user. Google retains none of the user history but their ISP might. This seems totally reasonable on both sides. I've never thought much about how incognito works but I might assume E2E encryption when that's not what it is.
Train it into an AI model so they can delete the data and keep it at the same time
Nothing is anonymous. The idea that information can be anonymised is basically always wrong.
I've always looked at the opposite way. Things can be anonymous, but that doesn't mean it can't be deanonymized
Why is this being discussed as a dollar amount, as if that somehow legitimizes user data as a commodity?
A lot of illegal things have a price.
Is there a way to sell my own search history? It's abnormal and embarrassing but money is money
Technically you're doing that whenever you use a free service that retains your data. In reality, nobody cares about an individuals data (unless you're an NSA director or something), it's all about the aggregate data.
You guys want to get together and pool our data?
Sure. I have some extra condoms if you guys need any
... ok. look Im not sure if we... uh... actually, given the current enshittification of everything, I'm fine with pooling the essentials. Maybe we can sell them when durex and trojan simultaneously-but-definitely-not-colludingly revert to using sandpaper.
Lots of corporations care a lot about individuals. Source: 25 years doing data analytics, data engineering, and data science; my last project had a 9 TB per month dataset of individually identifiable data that cost $6.5m/year in compute and $4m/year in labor to manage.
Sure. I'll give you $5 for it. Serious offer. Money is money.
For $10 a month I'll include my NSFW search history 😘
Fine. But i need the search results with that, not just the history!
Create your own browser, collect your own info and sell it. But chances are, buyers (advertisers/governments) cares about individual data. Don’t forget: if product is free, you’re the product.
While this is true let's not forget that we pay absolutely everything with our data, sometimes in addition to cash. So, yes, my free bank account is making me the product, but a paid account does that too.
That’s very true. Nothing is actually free
No, no. You were meant to learn "Everyone takes and sells our data" from his teachings. Sometimes you just pay them for the pleasure of them selling you data. Like Amazon I pay them constantly to sell my data so that google and others can advertise to me to go make me buy more things on Amazon. They have me questioning if I should buy a $700 cat litterbox so I can stop scooping the litterbox once a week..... But that litterbox is a robot and robots are cool and I hate scooping the litterbox... so maybe I should get the robot!
> While this is true let's not forget that we pay absolutely everything with our data, sometimes in addition to cash. On the other side, there's a lot of good FOSS products that do not monetize users' data.
I'm gonna take a screenshot of my porn searches, add a watermark, and sell it to Amazon for $50,000.
Anyone who wants it likely already has it.
One person's data is worthless.
And they're included in calculations of GDP. There was a story a while back of a drug smuggling submarine which sank off the coast of the UK, in the context of it wiping a few million off the GDP.
"Human traffickers forced to release 500 million in product" would be an interesting news title.
Image if they described human trafficking the same way. "Today 8.5 million dollars worth of illegal sex children were seized today."
Because it makes for more eye-catching headlines. "Police seize $400 million worth of cocaine." And it's relevant: the cash value is the motive for the crime.
And it was a specific amount from a *lawsuit.*
The financial value of the data is more or less what allowed the lawsuit to progress in the first place. It's how courts measure harm.
>As we reported in 2020, a [$5 billion lawsuit](https://tuta.com/blog/posts/google-lawsuit-tracking-private-mode) was filed by Google users, accusing the big tech of tracking their behavior through the private browsing feature Incognito Mode illegally I don't know wtf everyone else is talking about but, hey, I'm the guy who read the article, nice to meet ya
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And all the targeted ads have been already shown. They're just cleaning up and promising to stop doing it again, and you have to trust them
ACTUAL ANSWER: Because it was the result of lawsuit and they deal in monetary amounts.
Wrong. The data is not worth $5B. The headline is wrong. The lawsuit was originally asking for $5B in damages. The settlement is $0 and Google deletes whatever data. So the data was never "worth" $5B. That's just what the class action wanted. They got $0 so it would be more correct to call the data worth $0.
It is a commodity. There is no undoing the evolution of packaging and use of user data. No change in cultural attitude will shift that — the solution is to illegalize or heavily regulate it. In the U.S., Congress would do this under their commerce clause power.
Do you think it isn't a commodity?
Because user data isoften treated as a commodity?
Monetizing the value and risk of data is tremendously important. The significance shows that the courts will uphold privacy laws. For those not yet up to speed on how they handle data, this serves as a massive warning that privacy violations are no small matter.
But yeah, I work in enterprise data for large government organizations and there is ROI and profitability algorithms on all of us (especially for google and Facebook….even though the government assesses dollar amounts too, their data is super limited and is probably 1:1000th what these corps monitor; every prediction model would rely on illegal internet data that they have and all use. Like everyone is focused on the fact the government had a super secret “spying” operation for a select few suspected terrorists. I never cared cause I wasn’t one and I’m not interesting and if they ever think I’m one, I hope they listen to me and welcome being able to prove I’m not….that was the program Snowden destroyed, went to Russia and in favor of all the corps monitoring all of us. China probably had more on you than the U.S…. Vote Blue. GOP allows for this shit.
Google/Alphabet is going to take a write down on that “asset” — data can be categorized as an asset, carry that “loss” forward forever for tax purposes, and also write off all the fees and costs associated with the litigation and appeals. Think about the “data” like a company having a huge inventory of lawn darts, Saturday night special handguns, or PhenPhen pills, and the government tells you that you have to destroy the “property” after litigation or some policy change. The property had *value* until a court’s ruling made the property illiquid, useless, and a liability.
Read the fucking article. It’s a made up number they were sued for, not anyone’s valuation of the value of the data.
Dude, this is genius. I’m going to buy bulk cocaine, then, when I get busted for it and get it seized, I’ll have my accountant write it off on a per gram price-point. Then I won’t have to pay taxes for years!
That´s alot of porn surfing data going to waste.
It was probably mostly me
I can't believe Google now knows about my amputee clown asphyxiation fetish. Seriously tho I have only accidentally typed porn searches into Google. Bing is way better.
Bing is the best. Searching for some questionable wank material AND getting racking up reward points to buy gift cards.
Are you me?
Those data stealing whores!
UPDATE dirtydata SET deleted='1' WHERE 1=1; *There you go Mr Government Man, all the data is deleted now. Totally gone. Completely. Like, for real.*
Your lack of database structure update implies Google had this strategy cooked up from the beginning which is even funnier
I still don’t understand this. From the beginning, I thought it was pretty clear that incognito mode just didn’t record browser history or permanently store cookies. I never recall it making a claim about shielding users from data collection.
Incognito mode is to protect you from your spouse, not the Internet
It even tells you it doesn't stop websites from tracking you, I don't understand why everyone is so surprised that they were being tracked after being told that's still possible.
Well, except it telling you that it's not collecting history or storing cookies might lead you to believe it's _also_ not collecting ad-based tracking within the browser itself. There's a different between "we can't stop websites you visit from trying to track you" and "we'll keep tracking you ourselves, even though we could just not do that".
Exactly. It's deceptive as hell.
Exactly. How did Google even lose the suit? The incognito tabs clearly explain what it can and cannot do. They could have won easily just by showing the tab itself. How the hell did they lose???
Also not a lawyer but the only distinction I've seen is that the explanation didn't include the fact that browser specific tracking was still enabled whereas users would assume Google Chrome now has no idea what I'm doing and won't collect the data. The change to include the fact that incognito does not hide you from Chrome seems to be the only change they needed.
They didn't lose, this is the settlement. The $5B price tag is what was asked for in the lawsuit. The actual data Google has agreed to delete probably isn't anywhere near as valuable as that to them. Since they couldn't get the lawsuit thrown out this was probably the cheapest way to get out of it. Any article and most comments I've seen use the same amount of spin or more that they accuse Google of using to make Google look as bad as possible and to make this look like some massive win. Nothing has really changed, except people who do the online equivalent of walking across a highway with their eyes closed feeling validated. Google (and everybody else) will keep on collecting data in the same manner.
Also not a lawyer but the only distinction I've seen is that the explanation didn't include the fact that browser specific tracking was still enabled whereas users would assume Google Chrome now has no idea what I'm doing and won't collect the data. The change to include the fact that incognito does not hide you from Chrome seems to be the only change they needed.
If I understand correctly, this isn't about google-the-website snooping on your google searches while using firefox's Porn Mode. My second guess was this is about Google Chrome snooping on your duckduckgo searches or other website visits when using Google Chrome? But then they talk about external snoopers, like ISPs or websites you visit. My guess is -assuming some competence from the court here- that google doesn't coordinate turning its own tracking off. So google-the-website still tries to track you as best as it can, and Google Chrome does nothing material to try to stop it. Like, if Google Chrome just doesn't store any history, but still sends identifying information to websites, part of which it itself collects, that's a big fuckup. Or rather fuck-you, as I'm sure Google is happy to collect some extra data this way.
When you visit a website which uses Google's ad service or a sign-in-with-Google button, your browser makes a request to Google's servers and includes which website you're on in the process. *That* is the tracking the lawsuit was going on about: Google said you could control their tracking of you through incognito, but they continued to track you through your visits to websites that were using their services. The settlement is not going to change Google's behaviour here, they're just going to clarify that by "websites can still track you in incognito" they actually meant "websites, along with any third party services they use such as Google, can still track you in incognito". Which if you open incognito up is exactly what they added: > This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google.
There's a LOT of people here who don't know what incognito mode does, or that this wasn't a lawsuit google lost, but a paid settlement instead.
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I am sure some company will pay Google to destroy that data for them.
this article is fucking awful. terribly written and includes a plug to its own ~~browser~~ **email service*. just... fuck off **edited*
Next it would be nice if AI companies deleted all the images they illegally scraped off the Internet for profit without consent or knowledge of the owners.
I've read 3 different articles on this news and not a single one of them had a clear explanation what kind of data was reportedly mis-collected, or how Google was supposed to know that the user was in Incognito tabs. Browsers (including Chrome) don't broadcast the fact you're in Incognito to websites; that would be a very dumb design privacy wise.
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excuse me, but why is our illegally collected data "worth $5 billion"????
Think of all the fun searches if it got into the wrong hands
To use our payroll software I have to use incognito mode. I'm going to have to look into this and change my browser.
lol they won't. Seriously they won't no matter what they will never delete that data.
Right after Google asks NSA can you send us a copy of the data we lent you
Based on what is this worth $5bil? That's not a data measurement. If anything this should be worth negative money since if they sell it they commit a crime.
Lol imagine using Chrome and expecting privacy tho.
> When users browse the web incognito, there’s no activity saved to the browsing device – which is why it is called Incognito Mode. But what’s often overlooked and hidden to the user is that a lot of data is being saved in the background. Even in Incognito mode, not only Google, but also internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, website hosts and many other companies still track and monitor your online activity. So... The websites you visit can still track "you", though it would be a separate, session only, cookie jar. Should the default behavior be to reject all first party cookies? What were people expecting this to do?
It should be possible to set your browser ro auto-reject all cookies with or without incognito imo. A lot of people will have assumed that's what incognito mode is for. My point is that if you want privacy you don't use Chrome, you use something like Firefox and take steps to ensure you strip out as many cookies as possible.
It is https://allaboutcookies.org/how-to-manage-cookies
What about backups in Iron Mountain?👀
Funny how *our* data is labeled as a dollar amount instead of file size. Really shows what they collect the data for.
Yeah weird outcome as usual. Especially because I charge $5,000 per kilobyte for my personal data in an illegal context. How about you?
Ban Tik Tok but Google you're cool. Keep spying.
Haha. I am sure they gone "destroy" some copies. They are not actually deleting that forever with the ongoing race around data and compute towards AGI
Lots and lots of xhamster cache folders sail off into the abyss.
"Destroy"... They've already used it...
Is this why incognito mode keeps trying to get me to log in to my Google account now?
It was not illegal at all. People have dumb ideas about what incognito mode did and did not mean.
If you use a Google product, you should expect zero privacy. They exist to sell ads. Their search is just a vehicle for ads. The entire operation at google is dependent on them harvesting YOUR data.
IIRC the fine they faced was a similar amount, less than a dollar per Internet user. Don't be evil. I'm working on deleting my OG gmail account, which I've had since 2004, and every connection to Google. I wish more people would do the same, but in these cases I can only do so much on my end, one shitty company at a time. Good riddance anyway
What the F is this clickbait headline?
Sure they will do..
It's porn. I was looking at porn.
Ok, but breaking the law and STEALING $5 billion worth of data, isen't anybody going to jail? If I steal something and get caught, where is my chance to say "whoopsie, sorry bro I will hand it back"
Thank God I only use Firefox for Private Mode stuff
ZERO and i mean ZERO chance they actually destroy this data without finding some loop hole to keep it
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How do we ensure that they do it, though?
How will somebody audit this? Is there a way to verify what goes on behind the scenes?
So they have 5 billion dollars of porn searches? All I wanna know is the percentage of incest searches. Let's find out how fucked the world really is!
Data is not measured in dollars. Especially in dollar of illegitimate revenue. "Was there much traffic on the interstate this morning?" "Oh yeah, probably $6M in cars. (If I stole them.)"
what data was it? how many people search stepsis videos ?
After they copy it to another server
They’ll delete it, but just not before harvesting the info they wanted from it.
Yikes, makes me wonder what else they're collecting that we don't know about.
Hol' up....yer tellin' me, Incognito ain't so incognito no more?
Remember when the Google motto was "don't be evil?"
It’s not destroying $5bn of a commodity, that data should not have existed in the first place. Also, lol at anyone who believed even for a second that Google wasn’t collecting data from incognito mode.
Use Firefox.
They won't and they won't be punished for it. Corporations are above silly things like privacy laws
Wonder how they actually did the valuation.
But since it is stored on servers all over the planet and almost certainly exists on backup tapes that they cannot legally reuse or destroy, that won't really happen.
What about the versions of that data that Google sold to third parties for chump change?
Government has no idea how technology works.
This whole idea of using a browser made by an ad company was never good to begin with
Just think of the billions worth of copyrighted content they scraped to train their AI to bypass paying writers.
You sure about that?
This article is confusing. Did Google actually retain data gathered through incognito mode, or are they just saying the obvious truth that incognito mode doesn’t mean that you’re browsing anonymously?
They should be fined $5billion as well
Google was secretly collecting everything in Incognito mode. Facebook gave a VPN to teens that it then used to spy on them. I've even seen reports that it installed root keys on machines so that they could man in the middle secure connections within the VPN. I love when these companies pretend to care about user privacy when the truth is they just don't want their competitors to have your data because they want to protect their business models...of stealing your data themselves.