Exploring Possibility of Developing Private Search Engine Following Tech Controversy

During the government’s significant antitrust case against Alphabet Inc.’s Google, a senior vice president testified that the company contemplated developing a less invasive method for internet searches, which would not monitor the websites visited by users.

It was 2019 and Google was on the defensive as tech companies dealt with the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users was secretly scraped and mined for voter insights.

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Google ultimately rejected the idea, according to a statement from the company’s executive vice president, Prabhakar Raghavan. In part, this was because of how so-called incognito Google could hurt the company’s ad revenue.

“One of the concerns was that if Google accepted the proposal, users would choose it and Google would lose billions of dollars in revenue, right?” Justice Department attorney Joshua Hafenbrack questioned Raghavan in federal court in Washington.

“That was just one of the concerns,” Raghavan said. The company also considered the difficulty of trying to explain to users the difference between incognito browsing and incognito mode on the Chrome browser, which doesn’t track website browsing history, he said.

The anecdote represents a rare glimpse into how one of the world’s most powerful technology companies deals with the fundamental tension between user privacy and business interests. In the biggest technology monopoly lawsuit of the past two decades, Justice Department lawyers have argued that the amount of search query data people provide to Google is the lifeblood of the company’s success. The data is “for the oxygen machine,” said Kenneth Dintzer, the DoJ’s chief legal officer, in his opening statement at the trial.

The government’s case centers on the idea that Google illegally maintains a monopoly on online search by preventing competitors from competing effectively. Google claims that businesses and users choose its service as their default search engine because it’s the best.

But under questioning from Hafenbrack, Raghavan testified that Google’s decision to kill the standalone incognito search engine was partly because it would lose advertising revenue if less user data were fed into its system.

Consumer privacy online was of great interest at the time because of Cambridge Analytica. The consulting firm was hired by former President Donald Trump’s campaign and obtained Facebook user data to target advertising. In July 2019, Facebook, which has since been renamed Meta Platforms Inc., paid a record $5 billion fine for the episode. Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared before Congress in December 2018 and promised that the company would “do better” to help users understand their online privacy choices.

Later, in an announcement in the New York Times in May 2019, Pichai took the pledge that privacy is not a “luxury good” and highlighted a recent feature that made it easier for users to automatically remove their data from Google.

Raghavan said while testifying in court this week that before the change, Google kept a user’s search history indefinitely. Today, it only keeps data for 18 months.

In June 2019, Google’s search team proposed several changes to Google’s search product in response to the private search engine DuckDuckGo, including retaining user location and search history data. Benedict Gomes, then Google’s head of search, supported making the changes, but Raghavan — who then headed search advertising — testified that he wasn’t convinced they were necessary.

Gomes said in an email exchange at the time that privacy is a “sensitive search area” and “an important positioning point that is a potential threat.”

In a “sharply” email to Gomes, Raghavan said: “I agree that there is something worth exploring in this private search mode. But the teams need to do MUCH more careful work before wasting our valuable time. I want to see evidence that this factor is having a real impact on Google users .”

Raghavan said he was “looking for much more careful data and analysis.”

Google did not accept the proposal, Raghavan said, although it eventually created a feature that allows a user to delete their last 15 minutes of search history.

The DOJ’s Hafenbrack noted that Google surveyed consumers about how long they wanted the tech company to keep data, and most answered one month. Raghavan said he did not remember.

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