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Comment by blindm | Hacker News Reader

The thing about Cookie-law and cookie privacy issues is: it assumes everyone has this centralized browsing session that they use for /all/ their browsing. There would be a good number of people who use incognito mode or private browsing mode. I don't know the stats, but I imagine a good chunk of people use incognito mode for NSFW surfing sessions. And whilst cookie banners are annoying, they are a small price to pay if it means you have the choice to wipe cookies after a browsing session.

For me personally I use different browsers for different things, and if I don't want to be tracked and have browsing artifacts like cookies correlating data together and tracking me, I just go incognito and call it a day. Google's attempt to re-design how browsers work at this fundamental level is welcomed, but that means other browsers have to do the same, which I don't see happening. Firefox rarely copies Chrome features (or Chrome's anti-features).

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I use incognito mode _almost exclusively_ for SFW content. Heck, I use at least five browsers, container tabs, private modes, etc, and have rotating external IP endpoints as well as using Duck Duck Go. I have a pihole, and OS level application firewalls.

I've got a PhD and I find the lengths required to have some modicum of privacy on the internet truly insane, and at times, a little technologically annoying (especially when you have to debug which random script broke a particular page). The other trouble is of course apps: android is just a _dumpster fire_ and every MS product causes an awful lot of blocklist entries to mobile.pipe.aria.microsoft.com.

_Something_ new would be nice, but I fundamentally think that Google is the most conflicted company possible to deliver it.

>Firefox rarely copies Chrome features (or Chrome's anti-features). In so far as web technology goes, it certainly does. Lots of half-baked, non-standard features get added to Chrome, sites start using them, and then Mozilla has to follow suit in order to maintain web compatibility.

As a user of tab containers and cookie auto deletion, cookie notices and sign up prompts are the bane of my existance. I audibly growl each time I open YouTube.

I simply can't use YouTube anymore directly. It's too annoying. Whenever I get a link, I just go right to youtube-dl and download the video because YouTube's interface is so awful.

The overwhelming majority of users run incognito/private mode only for porn and equivalent, to avoid leaving traces on the machine. The law should assume incognito mode does not exist, as a baseline.

> Firefox rarely copies Chrome’s features

I hope this is sarcasm. Sadly, FF is effectively pushed by market forces to adopt most Chrome features, down to the extension mechanics. This has always been true for every player, to be fair, it just so happens that Chrome is the current reference.

> to avoid leaving traces on the machine

Yes you may not leave traces or history on the machine, but cookies can be correlated to other activity. For example, when logged into a Google account, if the site uses Google Analytics and you are logged into Google, then Google can build a profile of you and target ads at you based on your activity.

Also: Browsing artifacts may be left on a machine anyway due to swap (on Linux) or Windows' memory paging file. This is why I advocate for using something like TailsOS[0] if you don't want to leave a trace and be as anonymous as possible.

Yes, TailsOS is a lot of overhead for most people, but worth it if you want your privacy real bad.

[0] https://tails.boum.org/

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