Google faces $5B lawsuit in U.S. for tracking 'private' internet use | Hacker News Reader

Google faces $5B lawsuit in U.S. for tracking 'private' internet use

reuters.com

36 pointscracker_jacks12 comments

Discussed earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397045 (73 points, 13 hours ago, 36 comments)

Google appears to be claiming that because they warn you about 3rd party trackers this is all fine. They are just another 3rd party tracker it seems.

Maybe it's time to stop treating Google like a technology company. They don't seem to be pushing the internet forward, instead every decision makes the internet worse and has to be rallied against. There is very little research going on outside of increasing advertising effectiveness to scale up the size of the stock buybacks. Watching them continually screw up products like hangouts and chat and stadia and then just abandon them to increase stock buybacks yet again is just infuriating.

Maybe it's time to start treating Google like they are just another annoying 3rd party tracker. That seems to be what they want now.

Google are an ad company not a technology company

About time, but my guess is this won't go very far. Google can afford better legal counsel than the government itself. Still, this is a good step in the right direction, and the only way to push back on privacy violations is to make it unprofitable for corporations to get away with it (through fines, taxation, etc).

When privacy violations become unprofitable, "tech" companies will have to go back to making new technology.

People who use WhatsApp -- are you sure it is end to end encrypted or do you think FB are saying that to save face while just reading the messages for insightful keyword trends?

It wouldn't shock me to learn this kind of lying from big tech companies is common.

If Google do it why not Facebook or other big tech companies. At least Apple have shown it in their financial interest to keep your data private. Not so for the ad companies.

Could someone put that in context of how much that could actually hit them and how realistic it is for that to happen?

Google's revenue for 2019 was $161 billion, so $5b amounts to about 3.1% of their revenue.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/financials?p=GOOG

Doesn't sound like something that they could actually care about. How much theoretically would they have to lose in order to actually have to comply?

Assuming they had to pay the full amount, sure, it might make a dent, but it's also a one time event. It amounts to losing ~11 days of revenue, less than 2 weeks.

But earnings was only $34 billion. A ~15% hit to earnings would probably not fare very well on the market, even if it is only one-time.

Is the lawsuit about tracking in Chrome’s “private” mode or Google tracking (or attempting to track) all browsers using “private” mode?

For what I understood, is for all browsers. It's not about chrome tracking you if you are in private, but google trying to match your incognito and regular data.

From the article:

> researchers have long raised concern that Google and rivals might augment user profiles by tracking people’s identities across different browsing modes, combining data from private and ordinary internet surfing

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