98 million people turned off Google's tracking.
Google kept tracking them anyway. For eight years.
Every app you opened. Every site you visited. Every search, every tap, every scroll. All of it collected, stored, and used, even after you went into your Google account and turned off "Web & App Activity," the setting Google told you would stop it.
A federal jury in San Francisco saw the evidence and fined Google $425 million. The verdict came down in Rodriguez v. Google LLC, covering roughly 98 million users and 174 million devices between 2016 and 2024. The jury found Google liable for invasion of privacy. Google says it plans to appeal. The data was already collected.
That was the first lawsuit.
Then a second case revealed something worse. Google was taking your data and auctioning it off to thousands of companies, billions of times a day, in real-time bidding auctions you never knew existed. Your location. Your browsing history. Your device details. Packaged into a "bid request" and broadcast to hundreds of advertisers in milliseconds, every time you loaded a webpage. Even companies that lost the bid still received your data.
A judge approved a settlement in March 2026 and forced Google to build a new opt-out switch. It went live on April 24, 2026. Almost nobody knows it exists.
Here are the 5 switches. The ones that actually work.
Why the old switch didn't protect you:
Google's "Web & App Activity" toggle was supposed to stop data collection. That is what the setting says in plain English. But a separate, lower-level stream of data kept flowing from every third-party app on your phone that uses Google's developer tools, things like Uber, Venmo, Instagram, and hundreds of others. You see one toggle, set to off. Google sees a second pipeline you never knew about, still running.
The jury agreed. $425 million.
The new switches below close both pipelines. Here is every one of them.
1/ Turn off the tracking switch that was already supposed to be off
This is the original toggle that 98 million people relied on and Google ignored. Turn it off again. This time it is backed by a $425 million verdict.
Go to myaccount.google.com → Data and privacy → Web & App Activity.
Turn it off.
Then click "Manage all Web & App Activity" and delete everything already collected: Delete → All time → All products.
If you turned this off years ago and assumed you were safe, you were not. Do it again. Delete what was collected behind your back.
2/ Turn off the switch Google was forced to build (the one almost nobody knows about)
This is the new one. A judge forced Google to create it. It went live on April 24, 2026. It stops Google from sharing your identifying data in real-time bidding ad auctions.
Find "Help advertisers select ads for you."
Turn the blue check off so it shows a gray X.
That is it. One click. When this is on, every time you load a webpage, your device ID, IP address, browsing signals, and advertising identifiers get broadcast to thousands of companies in a split-second auction. When it is off, those identifiers get stripped from the bid request.
This switch exists because a lawsuit forced it. Google was not going to build it voluntarily.
The 10-second version (do not skip this):
Switch 1: myaccount.google.com → Data and privacy → Web & App Activity → off → delete all.
Switch 2: adssettings.google.com/partnerads → "Help advertisers select ads for you" → off.
Both. Not one. Both pipelines need to be closed or your data still flows through the one you missed.
3/ Kill the other two trackers while you are in there
Same page as switch 1. Two more toggles sitting right next to it that most people scroll past.
Location History → off. This stops Google from logging everywhere your phone goes.
YouTube History → off. This stops Google from building a profile based on everything you watch.
Both on by default. Both feeding the same advertising system.
4/ Delete your advertising ID entirely
Your phone has a unique advertising ID that follows you across every app. It is the string that ties all of this together. Delete it.
On Android: Settings → Privacy → Ads → Delete advertising ID.
On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking → turn off "Allow Apps to Request to Track."
Without this ID, the bid requests from switch 2 have nothing to attach your data to. The auction still runs, but you are no longer a named participant.
5/ Block the tracking that runs through your browser
Google Chrome does not block trackers. It is built by the same company running the auctions.
Switch to Brave or Firefox. Both block tracking requests by default. Install uBlock Origin if you stay on Chrome. It catches what Chrome deliberately lets through.
This is the layer that stops new data from being collected going forward, so the switches you just flipped stay meaningful.
What Google says vs. what the jury found:
Google says its privacy tools give users "meaningful control" and that when users turn off personalization, Google "honors that choice." That is a direct quote from their spokesperson after the verdict.
The jury looked at eight years of evidence and disagreed. $425.7 million. The plaintiffs had asked for $31 billion.
Google is appealing. But the data was already collected, already auctioned, already in the hands of thousands of companies you have never heard of. The appeal does not undo that. The switches above stop it from continuing.
Start tonight. Two switches. Two minutes. Both pipelines closed.
While everyone else still trusts the tracking toggle that a jury just proved was fake, yours will actually be off.
🚨 Reply "WIPE" and I will send you the full guide to wipe yourself off the internet: 8 prompts that remove your data from the web, plus the 15 biggest data brokers and their direct opt-out links so you can start deleting in the next 10 minutes.
Cheers,
Matas Jonaitis
Founder, DailyChatGPT (@dailyprompter)