Google sued for allegedly tracking users' app activity via Firebase even after opting out of sharing data in settings, following Incognito mode suit last month
A lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges Google tracks user activity through hundreds of thousands of apps, even after people opt out of sharing information.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second privacy suit against Google within about six weeks: a proposed $5B class action over Incognito mode landed in June 2020 alleging covert browsing collection via Google Analytics and similar tools, and Tuesday's filing extends the same accusation to Firebase, which ships inside hundreds of thousands of third-party apps.
The claim also revives an older pattern — the [[a:932361|2018 investigation that found Google apps storing location data even with Location History paused]] — by asserting that user-facing sharing toggles don't actually stop Google-side collection through embedded developer tools.
First-order effects
- Users who opted out of data sharing learn their setting doesn't govern Firebase-instrumented apps, while Google now faces parallel class-action exposure on both browser (Incognito) and app (Firebase) tracking surfaces.
Second-order effects
- App developers embedding Firebase face pressure to audit what telemetry leaves their apps under users' privacy settings, since the lawsuit makes their SDK choices a legal liability rather than a purely engineering one.
Third-order effects
- The Incognito suit followed this exact arc from filing to agreed settlement in late 2023, establishing a template where opt-out promises are litigated after the fact — and court disclosures like the documents showing Google made privacy toggles harder to find suggest the real battleground is whether settings must control every SDK-level data flow, not just first-party surfaces.
The trend: Privacy litigation is becoming the enforcement mechanism for opt-out controls, forcing tracker economics built into embedded SDKs toward contractual and regulatory accountability.