Google will destroy billions of records containing personal information after the lawsuit is settled.
The company secretly tracked the private Chrome web browsing of more than 136 million U.S. users, according to the complaint.
The terms of the settlement were filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Oakland, California, and must be approved by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
This comes more than three months after Google and the class action lawyers announced they had reached an agreement in the case, which began in June 2020.
The lawsuit alleges that Google’s analytics, cookies, and apps allowed the company to track and collect information when users were in incognito mode or other private browsing settings.
“We are pleased to have settled this lawsuit, which we have long believed to be without merit,” Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said in a statement. The company claimed it was only required to “delete old personal technical data that is not associated with an individual or used for any form of personalization.”
The value of the settlement is more than $5 billion, with a maximum value of $7.8 billion. However, while Google has not paid damages to affected users, users themselves can sue Google. Google will also update the disclosures it tells users at the time of data collection and allow incognito users to block third-party cookies for five years.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers, led by David Boies, said in a statement that the settlement is a “historic step in demanding honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies.”
Some information for this report was provided by Reuters and The Associated Press.