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Comment by Null-Set | Hacker News Reader

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

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