
Google faces $5B lawsuit in U.S. for tracking 'private' internet use - cracker_jacks
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-privacy-lawsuit/google-faces-5-billion-lawsuit-in-us-for-tracking-private-internet-use-idUSKBN23933H
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merricksb
Discussed earlier:

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

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noad
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.

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jonplackett
Google are an ad company not a technology company

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brenden2
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.

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s_dev
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.

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d33
Could someone put that in context of how much that could actually hit them and
how realistic it is for that to happen?

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brenden2
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](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/financials?p=GOOG)

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d33
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?

~~~
brenden2
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.

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wil421
Is the lawsuit about tracking in Chrome’s “private” mode or Google tracking
(or attempting to track) all browsers using “private” mode?

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FalconSensei
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

