Someone really ought to sue Google so that during discovery Google will be compelled to speak the truth. The amount of confusion in this issue is immense. And tech publications like ZDNet is part of the problem. Conflating concepts like tracking vs collecting, not to mention the distinction between anonymous, pseudonymous, and tied-to-account tracking. In this particular article the title "tracking" clearly doesn't match the article's content where the Google spokesperson says "so that data was immediately discarded". Is Google lying about this? I think only a legal discovery will find out.
Yes it is. Personally, I dislike tracking and don't mind disparaging Google for it - but I think in this case reporting like this manages to miss the heart of the problem and mischaracterize the situation.
The writing on this case has been so bad I haven't been able to figure out if Google is being accused of tracking users in incognito mode by secretly saving searches or history to profiles, or just giving the false impression of total anonymity.
That’s another big claim. If Google did this covertly, and it was found out, Google’s reputation would be in the toilet. That’s why I think they don’t do it.
"Willfully misleads and deceives" is verbatim from the lawsuit. IANAL but that sounds like "deliberately lies" to me.
From the lawsuit: for years, Google has known that the user experience they designed misleads and deceives users. The evidence obtained from within Google—such as internal emails, presentations, and memos—is overwhelming in this regard
They knew that they were deceiving users, and liked it that way.
An example of of how Google uses this data: Google will track if you click an ad for Cheesecake Factory and later physically visit one. This allows them to charge higher rates for ads. This isn't a secret, they brag about that capability. It's why they use so many dark patterns to push users to enable location tracking.
And yet no one, including people in this thread who are claiming that the intent of Google's wording is to deceive, are actually the slightest bit unclear about what Google means.
Of course it's hedged with a limitation of scale. Obviously Google, like any other company, is going to provide information on much smaller scales (e.g. a user or a handful of users) for investigation based on specific court-issued warrants. It would be lying to state that Google never provides information about any user activity at all.
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