Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Google agrees to destroy browsing data collected in Incognito mode (www.theverge.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Not sure which news website I should be using for the link, sorry! I'm happy to change it if anyone has a better one.

Google agreed to destroy or de-identify billions of records of web browsing data collected when users were in its private browsing “Incognito mode,” according to a proposed class action settlement filed Monday.

The proposal is valued at $5 billion, according to Monday’s court filing, calculated by determining the value of data Google has stored and would be forced to destroy and the data it would be prevented from collecting. Google would need to address data collected in private browsing mode in December 2023 and earlier. Any data that is not outright deleted must be de-identified.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

When the data is aggragated there's no true anonymization:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/24/researchers-spotlight-the-lie-of-anonymous-data

https://www.fastcompany.com/90278465/sorry-your-data-can-still-be-identified-even-its-anonymized

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Do you mean not aggregated? Do you mean aggregating different kinds of data, or do you mean grouping together the same data for a category?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I mean that when lots of data is compiled, you can remove specific identifiers such as names, emails, IP addresses, phone numbers, etc (anonymization) but it's been demonstrated that it's relatively easy to re-identify specific individuals from "anonymized" data.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I think this means you still have some identifier that allows to link those data to a single person. This is quite explicitly not considered anonymization by the gdpr.