The Federal Trade Commission has not yet formerly announced a settlement with Google over alleged privacy violations Google may have committed over a seven-month period by bypassing the default security settings on Apple’s Safari web browser, which is the default browser on the iPad, iPhone and Mac computers. But an agency spokesperson told TPM to “stay tuned” for an announcement regarding Google coming soon.
The FTC’s alert comes after former Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and now head of his own eponymous security consulting firm, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal published online late Sunday casually stating that such a settlement had been reached. The Wall Street Journal previously published an article on July 10 stating that the FTC and Google were finalizing a privacy settlement to the tune of $22.5 million, which would be the largest fine in FTC’s history handed to any single company.
