Google mulled building private search in wake of tech scandal

In the biggest tech monopoly trial of the last two decades, lawyers for the Justice Department have argued that the volume of search query data people generate for Google is the lifeblood of the company’s success. — AP

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 defence 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.