Google Mulled Building Private Search in Wake of Tech Scandal
- ‘Incognito’ would have let users privately search web
- Google executive testified at DOJ antitrust trial over search
Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google, speaking during a virtual converence in 2021.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google considered creating a more private way to search the internet that wouldn’t track the sites users visited, according to testimony from a senior vice president in the government’s landmark antitrust case against the company.
The year was 2019 and Google was in defense mode as tech companies dealt with the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users was secretly scraped and mined for voter insights.