Google has agreed to a $135 million settlement that offers cash to more than 100 million Android users, resolving a class-action claim that the company collected cellular data from devices and used it in ways tied to targeted advertising. The settlement received preliminary court approval earlier this year, and while the headline number is large, the detail that should stick with you is subtler: some of that data moved across users’ paid cellular connections. In other words, people were effectively paying, out of their own data allowances, for information to be gathered about them.
That inversion is the whole game. We tend to picture data collection as something that happens to us for free, a quiet background process with no cost attached. The reality is that tracking consumes your bandwidth, your battery, and ultimately your money, all in service of building a profile you never asked to have built. A settlement cheque, whenever it eventually arrives, does not undo the collection. It simply puts a price tag on something that was never supposed to have one. We have written before about how ordinary financial arrangements can quietly cost you your privacy in when financial support doesn’t buy privacy.
It is also worth remembering that a settlement changes the accounting, not the behaviour. The incentives that drive companies to gather everything they can are still fully intact, and much of the collection people worry about does not happen at the network level at all. It happens in the browser, where the pages you visit hand your habits to advertisers and data buyers in real time. If you want to understand how thin the usual promises of privacy really are, our breakdown of Google’s own Incognito Mode and the facade behind it is a good place to start.
You cannot personally rewrite Google’s business model, but you can decide how much you feed it. Incognito Browser, the best free privacy browser for Android, blocks the trackers that turn everyday browsing into a data stream and clears everything the moment you leave, so there is no stored history waiting to be collected, subpoenaed, or sold. The Incognito Browser Android app will not send you a settlement cheque. It does something more useful: it stops the collection before it starts. You can download it free on the Google Play Store.
