Last week, the browser company Brave alleged that Google was using a mechanism called “push pages” to work around restrictions on the sharing of personally identifiable information (PII) laid out by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It did so, Brave said, by assigning a distinct, almost 2,000-character-long code to user information shared with advertisers.

Google issued a response to the site Tom’s Hardware, saying that it does not “serve personalised ads or send bid requests to bidders without user consent”.