Suzanne Kantra/Techlicious generated by ChatGPT
Google is facing a proposed class action lawsuit accusing it of routing American users' browsing data to Temu and Baidu, two China-based companies, through its advertising technology. The complaint, filed in California federal court, claims Google's tracking code, which runs in the background on countless websites to serve targeted ads, sent persistent identifiers, IP addresses, and other device-level details to Temu and Baidu.
The persistent identifiers are a unique tag attached to a phone or browser that lets companies recognize the same visitor across different websites over time. Combined with an IP address, which can reveal a general location, it gives a company a working profile of a person's browsing habits.
The lawsuit argues that sharing this information with Temu and Baidu broke the Department of Justice's Bulk Sensitive Data Rule, a federal regulation that took effect in April 2025 and restricts sending large volumes of Americans' personal data to certain countries, including China. Google has been named in at least three separate proposed class actions this year making similar China-data-transfer claims.
Google hasn't filed a public response to this specific complaint yet, and the claims remain allegations that a court has not evaluated.
If you want to limit how much of your data is shared by Google you can turn off ad personalization in the Data & privacy section of Google Account settings. To do that, toggle off "Personalize ads on Google" and then click on “Partner ads setting” and toggle off “Personalized ads on partner sites & apps” and “Help advertisers select ads for you.”
Read next: Is Amazon Haul worth it? How it compares to Temu and Shein
