JAKARTA - Tech giant Google is under threat of a class action lawsuit in the United States (US). Mountain View-based search engines are required to pay $ 5 billion in damages for illegally tracking users' browsing history while they are in 'incognito' (incognito) mode.
This lawsuit was filed in the Federal Court of San Jose, California, USA. In its lawsuit file, Google is accused of violating wiretapping and privacy laws by intercepting, tracking, and collecting secret communications from all US citizens, both from smartphones and computers.
"Google tracks and collects consumer browsing history and other web activity data, regardless of the safeguards that consumers put in place to protect the privacy of their data," said the lawsuit, launched Mashable, Saturday, June 6.
It is known that this information data collection process is also retrieved through the Google Analytics service, Google Ad Manager, website plug-ins and other applications, including mobile applications. It is stated that the data collected is used to understand user behavior on the internet, such as hobbies, favorite food, favorite items, user information, and so on.
In this regard, Google's parent company Alphabet has denied all allegations. Through Google spokesman Jose Castaneda, explaining incognito mode in Chrome provides an option for users to surf the internet without activity being saved to the browser or device.
"Incognito mode in Chrome allows user activity while surfing the internet not stored in the browser or on the device," said Castenda.
But in fact, according to Castenda, many users think that incognito mode is a private and safe search mode for accessing certain sites.
"As we clearly state every time you open a new incognito tab, websites may be able to collect information about your internet browsing activity," Castaneda said.
Summarized from the Forbes page, this class action lawsuit has impacted billions of Google users since June 1, 2016, who actively search in incognito mode. Of each affected user, Google is asked to pay 5,000 US dollars or approximately Rp.70.8 million because it is considered to be spying on user activities.
This is also not the first time Google has been sued over privacy issues. The search engine from Mountain View has also been fined 50 million euros, or around Rp. 800 billion by the French data protection authorities.
Google was fined for violating a number of data privacy and protection regulations (General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR) which became effective since last May in the European region. Based on investigative reports, at least Google has violated two regulations related to the GDPR.
The first violation, stated that Google was not transparent about access to data collection policies on its applications and how the data was used by Google. While the second violation, Google did not get sufficient approval from the user side in personalizing ads on various Google services, such as YouTube, Google Maps, and so on.
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