If you continue to maintain any notion that Google Chrome’s “Incognito mode” is an effective strategy to protect your privacy online, now’s time to cease.

Google has agreed to delete “billions of data records” the corporate collected whereas customers browsed the online utilizing Incognito mode, in response to documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday. The settlement, a part of a settlement in a category motion lawsuit filed in 2020, caps off years of disclosures about Google’s practices that make clear how a lot information the tech big siphons from its customers—even once they’re in private-browsing mode.

Under the phrases of the settlement, Google should additional replace the Incognito mode “splash page” that seems anytime you open an Incognito mode Chrome window after previously updating it in January. The Incognito splash web page will explicitly state that Google collects information from third-party web sites “regardless of which browsing or browser mode you use,” and stipulate that “third-party sites and apps that integrate our services may still share information with Google,” amongst different modifications. Details about Google’s private-browsing information assortment should additionally seem within the firm’s privateness coverage.

Additionally, a few of the information that Google beforehand collected on Incognito customers shall be deleted. This contains “private-browsing data” that’s “older than nine months” from the date that Google signed the time period sheet of the settlement final December, in addition to private-browsing information collected all through December 2023. Certain paperwork within the case referring to Google’s information assortment strategies stay sealed, nonetheless, making it tough to evaluate how thorough the deletion course of shall be.

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda says in a press release that the corporate “is happy to delete old technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalization.” Castaneda additionally famous that the corporate will now pay “zero” {dollars} as a part of the settlement after earlier going through a $5 billion penalty.

Other steps Google should take will embody persevering with to “block third-party cookies within Incognito mode for five years,” partially redacting IP addresses to forestall re-identification of anonymized person information, and eradicating sure header info that may at present be used to establish customers with Incognito mode lively.

The data-deletion portion of the settlement settlement follows preemptive modifications to Google’s Incognito mode information assortment and the methods it describes what Incognito mode does. For practically 4 years, Google has been phasing out third-party cookies, which the corporate says it plans to utterly block by the tip of 2024. Google additionally updated Chrome’s Incognito mode “splash page” in January with weaker language to suggest that utilizing Incognito will not be “private,” however merely “more private” than not utilizing it.

The settlement’s reduction is strictly “injunctive,” that means its central objective is to place an finish to Google actions that the plaintiffs declare are illegal. The settlement doesn’t rule out any future claims—The Wall Street Journal reports that the plaintiffs’ attorneys had filed at the very least 50 such lawsuits in California on Monday—although the plaintiffs word that financial reduction in privateness instances is way tougher to acquire. The vital factor, the plaintiffs’ legal professionals argue, is effecting modifications at Google now that can present the best, quick profit to the biggest variety of customers.

Critics of Incognito, a staple of the Chrome browser since 2008, say that, at finest, the protections it gives fall flat within the face of the sophisticated commercial surveillance bearing down on most customers at present; at worst, they are saying, the function fills folks with a false sense of safety, serving to firms like Google passively monitor tens of millions of customers who’ve been duped into considering they’re searching alone.