To settle a US lawsuit, Google has agreed to delete billions of data records after plaintiffs accused the tech giant of tracking users who thought they were privately browsing the internet.

The lawsuit, which was brought up in California, US, claimed that Google’s analytics and cookies improperly tracked users even when they were using ‘Incognito’ or ‘private’ browsing mode.

The lawsuit sought $5bn (£3.98bn) in damages, seeking recompense for breaches of user privacy.

Google is already beginning to update its disclosures about what it collects in ‘private’ browsing modes, but the lawsuit will allow users to block third-party cookies for five years when they are in Incognito mode.

Despite these concessions, Google has maintained that the lawsuit is meritless.

“We never associate data with users when they use Incognito mode,” Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said. “We are happy to delete old technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalization.”

However, documents revealed in the court case showed conversations between Google employees calling Google Chrome’s Incognito mode “effectively a lie,” according to the court filing.

The new disclosure reveals that Google does track user data even when they use private settings, but the mode means that browsing activity is not saved to the machine being used.

While Google did try to get the case dismissed, Judge Yvonne Rogers kept the company in court, saying that it did not seem users consented to the tracking of their data in private browsing mode.

Google has also said they are trailing a tool that would automatically block third-party cookies for all Google Chrome users, which would change the data tracking landscape as a whole.

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This block is currently in place for incognito users, and the limit will stay in place for at least the next five years, as decided in the settlement deal.

A lawyer for the prosecution David Boies, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, in a statement called the settlement “a historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies.”