Someone really ought to sue Google so that during discovery Google will be compelled to speak the truth. The amount of confusion in this issue is immense. And tech publications like ZDNet is part of the problem. Conflating concepts like tracking vs collecting, not to mention the distinction between anonymous, pseudonymous, and tied-to-account tracking. In this particular article the title "tracking" clearly doesn't match the article's content where the Google spokesperson says "so that data was immediately discarded". Is Google lying about this? I think only a legal discovery will find out.