Google , the tech giant have been accused of gathering data from user’s incognito mode without their permission. A lawsuit of $5 billion  have been filed in  the US District for Northern  district of California. The lawsuit has been filed by Mark C.mao, on behalf of three people based in Los Angeles, Chason Brown, Williams Byatt and Maria Nguyen. According to them , no matter what safety measures consumers take to protect the data privacy, Google still tracks and stores the data of consumer browsing history.

It’s not the first time that lawsuits have been filed against Google, but  this lawsuit dismisses the Federal Wiretap  Act(FWA).According to FWA, user’s are grant the right to sue if their private conversations  are either rapped or intercepted. It restricts the interception of content  which could be any electronic communication , wire or oral  .Under the FWA and California Privacy Act, $5000 is to be granted to each and every individual as a monetary compensation for violation of their privacy.. The user’s have the right to know about what all data is saved ,and what is not.

Let’s Understand the Incognito Mode?

Incognito mode is basically  making  you undercover, by not showing  the websites you’ve searched. Probably, for most of  us believe it’s the best preventive measure to  take. It’s been designed in a manner to remove local data, so that cookies could be either blocked or deleted, and the temporary files could be disabled. According to reports , if someone is using a Windows computer, the browsing history could be found in the computer data. It’s been said that not only the employees, but also the our Internet Service Providers(ISP) could view our browsing history as per their convenience. Incognito mode offers the false impression that the users have retained control about their browsing history.

The complaint argues that Google has been able to track users through Google Analytics ,Google Ad Manager and many more. The complaint talked about the practice of “Intentionally deceiving customers” , by maintaining full control of the customer’s browsing data, and even encouraging them to use and surf , by making them dream of their secured privacy.

Google in their defence to this lawsuit disagreed to this complaint .Jose Castaneda, their spokesperson talked about how the Incognito mode in Chrome gives the right to user’s to not save their data to the website, but added that each time we surf a website, the website might be able to get hold of the browsing information. However, it’s been mentioned in the Chrome help page that the Incognito doesn’t prevent location and action from being watched by the website. It’s been claimed that around 70 % of the users use Incognito mode, through this the Google receives the information like the user’s IP address , what user is viewing , details about what  they watched  and even details about the user’s hardware.

Two years back, researcher from Tennessee had come to the conclusion that the incognito data is collected with user-anonymous identifiers. Google has the ability to link the information with user identified credentials stored in the user’s Google Account.