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Comment by thorum | Hacker News Reader

Chrome's Incognito mode is pretty clear about what it does, and clearly states the fact that websites and ISPs can still track you.

Private Browsing has never been about hiding your traffic from analytics AFAIK. It's about your local browser history only.

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Firefox's private browsing feature blocks tracking scripts. Edge's doesn't as far as I can tell, and I haven't looked into the behavior of smaller Chromium-based browsers.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

Yup. Here's what it says precisely:

> Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won't see your activity. However, downloads and bookmarks will be saved. Learn more

> Chrome won't save the following information:

> Your browsing history

> Cookies and site data

> Information entered in forms

> Your activity might still be visible to:

> Websites you visit

> Your employer or school

> Your internet service provider

Seems pretty clear.

Note that it says that Chrome will not save said information. It does not (even the "learn more" pages, sorry, I couldn't be bothered to dive deep into the ToS over minor internet discussions) say anywhere that Google will not save said data. It does say that it won't be saved to _your_ Google account but that could mean a lot of things.

Of course, it doesn't mean anything, it is just paranoid thinking. A major multibillion corporation with a business based on tracking and advertising wouldn't simply store your "private" data for any reason, especially when there was no way to find out about it, enforce it not to, and punish it, if it transgressed.

Does it specifically say that although Chrome doesn’t save the information Google is saving it? The distinction between “Chrome won’t save information” and “information won’t be saved” is legally important to Google and intentionally unclear/misleading to the average Chrome user.

One more to add:

> Google

Last I checked, Google was a website.

Google is a company. Their tracking code isn't a website. It doesn't mention to users that that their private browsing mode doesn't actually protect users from their other products.

Yes, because it is not relevant. The website the user is browsing is what decided to put Google Analytics code on their page. It is their responsibility to tell their users that Google will get this data.

I think that would be a disingenuous argument from Google. Google is directly receiving the analytics data and then feeding only a portion of it to the website. They know that users are easily confused and don't fully understand that one Google product doesn't respect another Google product's "privacy" settings. Most of them probably don't even know what Google Analytics is or how Google makes money by tracking them.

There is no 'privacy' setting being flouted, other than one that's been entirely imagined up by commenters here.

In fact, if anything people should be against this kind of interaction between two completely independent arms of Google. Isn't that what the "Break Google Up" crowd wanted?

Right, just imagine the outcry if Chrome were working on countermeasures for incognito mode detection but also sent a proprietary message to Google Analytics to identity when someone is in incognito mode....

I'm not sure what it has to do with breaking up Google. I'm just saying that they are leading users to think that Google will stop tracking them if they turn on Google's private browsing mode.

The average user doesn't know what private browsing really mode means. If Google says you are in private browsing mode and that some other "websites and ISPs" might still track you, they aren't being clear that Google itself is still knowingly tracking you.

Google is not the ambiguous other "websites and ISPs." They are the ones making the claim that you are in private mode with a Google product, even though you aren't.

Users don't know how things work. They read that as if Google is respecting privacy, not tracking everything they do.

People are naïve when it comes to this: had a manager some years ago who used to watch porn usin company's phone in private mode.Got asked to attend a meeting in the head office just to be shown pages upon pages of browsing activities he had,while at work. Nearly got kicked out. In my current job I did tell pretty much everyone ( to their surprise) that private mode won't stop me from asking network logs from our IT support company.

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