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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

I hate tracking as much as the next person, but a simple reading of the "You've gone incognito" screen ought to make obvious that its primary purpose is to hide your activity from others who use the same device. It's literally written on the first line:

"Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won't see your activity."

It goes on to list other technical specifics about what is not saved, but those are pretty much just sub-points. I'm not sure it's fair to expect Incognito to do something it's not meant to do.

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(I worked on Chrome.) I remember struggling over how to word this page. At a technical level Chrome the program can only control what it itself does, which is also what the page promises. Unfortunately despite that the result is still confusing to users (and judges, it appears).

chrome the program could not make network requests to known tracking domains

Then websites would be able to tell if you were browsing with incognito on. Isn't that itself a privacy issue?

This is the irony here, to achieve what these people ask, Incognito mode itself would have to become inherently less private, for the sole purpose of stopping Google Analytics, but every other tracking service would probably become even more powerful.

uBlock Origin will do this for you, if you want that level of privacy. You do have to specifically allow it to operate under Incognito Mode, but then it "just works".

Yes, it's an add-on and not built into Chrome... and yes you have to know about it to install it in the first place. I'm not exactly sure that's a problem though - if you are technical enough to navigate through settings menus in your browser, understand what the settings mean and toggle options (presumable to enable some built-in version of uBlock Origin), then you clearly have the capability to install the add-on.

It's pretty funny how quickly the principles behind "net neutrality" (neutral platform, neutral pipes) fall to convenience.

I'm confused by your comment. Are you saying that browsers should connect to any host any website tells them to because of net neutrality?

Yes, a browser should be content-agnostic.

Browsers filtering "known trackers" is a very quick slide into "known malware", "known spammers", "known foreign propaganda", "known conspiracy theories", "known fake news", and more.

It's the exact path that social media and other online platforms took, and guess what? The same companies build browsers.

A browser should let the user control their browsing experience and make it extremely easy to block all manner of user hostile content, starting with trackers.

I don't disagree with you, but I think parent's point still stands that "user hostile content" is defined by a company that could change their definition at any time.

A truly user friendly solution would be to allow community curation of blocklists and full user control over which they choose to enable. Google is not interested in providing a good user experience though, they're interested in sucking out as much value from the user as possible, using dark patterns when convenient.

With that, I also agree that Google couldn't be trusted to editorialize.

No. "User hostile content" is defined by the user.

Google's whole business model is user tracking though. If they can't spy on you they go belly up, so chances are they won't stop spying on you.

Related: I don't understand why people choose to work for Google

I find it's the reverse:

"You've gone incognito" doesn't mean what it says on the tin.

It means "You've gone incognito... from other users of this computer, not from us. From us you're still plenty cognito."

Yeah but you are conflating the "tagline" with the full message.

By that regard, you aren't buying Apples, you are buying "Golden Delicious Apples certified organic by the State of California and could contain random chemical that might cause cancer to you"

Still apples, but now you question whether they are truly edible or safe, which you used to assume about all apples

In that analogy, it would be buying apples, but they only taste like apples. Underneath they’re oranges and always have been, and the little sticker on them says “Apple-seeming oranges”, so the consumer should have known.

When it came out it was don't save cookies so I can't be tracked.

Now that it is known google can track you outside of stored cookies it should probably be relabelled to no persistant cookies mode and leave the idea of incognito. Using that word makes it seem like you are using tor.

I think this is a difference between what someone who knows what's going on under the hood understands the disclaimer to mean, and what other/most people understand it.

The disclaimer put front and center is designed to tell you exactly what is going on. But, I'm not at all surprised that most people assume incognito/private modes provide far more protection than they actually do.

This is a fairly difficult and important technical communication problem: To make sure that most people after reading something understand what is meant. It's why you end up with all those really stupid sounding disclaimers on various products not do stupid things that seem obvious not to do.

Only because of the tension between honest communication and marketing. It is not shameful for a feature to be used less because it's misunderstood, but KPI's and product managers don't see the world that way, thus the tension.

I don't think that's always the case or completely the case here.

What is actually communicated is dependent on both parties in the communication. An entirely accurate statement can be made by one party, intended to communicate the facts in good faith. However, depending on what the second party knows, the statement may not actually communicate what was intended or what is true and accurate.

The difficulty then is saying something which is short enough to actually get read and still communicates to a large majority of people an accurate understanding of the situation.

Again, this is the best case where the people making the statement are acting in good faith. It all goes down hill from there though, if they are actually trying to mislead.

Compare

"you can browse privately, and"

"you can browse privately, in the sense that"

What does a user think browse privately means? Do they think it means "your browsing is shared with third-party data brokers that aren't displayed in the UI at all and you might not know exists?

It's one thing to say "well obviously we can't control what you choose to do with foobar.com"; it's another to say, "the same legal person who told you 'you can browse privately' is buying your browsing data from foobar.com".

Why not say,

"Now other people who use this device won't see your activity."

What does the bit before the 'and' mean?

I read it as "Now you can browse privately, and [therefore] other people who use this device won't see your activity."

Except that if Google is still tracking you, you're not browsing privately.

Right, unless you interpret the second half of the sentence as clarifying or defining the first. Which I do. If may not be your preferred definition of "private", but it is a definition of private.

To paraphrase it another way, it says "what you do on your browser is hidden, specifically it is hidden from other people who would try to find out using this device"

Further, given the overall ambiguity of English, and given the goal is something casual, not legalese, the way it is phrased is reasonable.

Actually, that raises an interesting point, how is this phrase rendered by chrome for other languages, and do any of them phrase it in a less ambiguous way?

Fun story, if you have a Gmail account and share it with many people. Gmail won't like it people logging in from a lot of different places... except when in incognito mode, then you can login without issue.

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