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Comment by ggggtez | Hacker News Reader

> Is it unreasonable to want, or even expect, an incognito window to disable all forms of tracking?

> Ask what the layperson would think tracking is!

No. No no no no no. There is a serious problem with this line of thinking. Lay people cannot dictate how technology must work. Because they don't understand what is possible.

This post is like the famous quote from that Australian politician

> The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia

It's simply not appropriate to assume that just because a lay person wants something to be true, that it must somehow be possible to actually do.

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> Lay people cannot dictate how technology must work.

That's an extraordinarily elitist view that, frankly, raises my hackles. It's worth remembering that the entire framing of entire political systems was and is done by non-technical "lay" people.

> It's simply not appropriate to assume that just because a lay person wants something to be true, that it must somehow be possible to actually do.

That's got everything backward. Regulation is about limiting technology's intrusion into our lives, technology that did not exist just short years and decades ago. Since we lived without this technology (by definition) since the dawn of man, clearly it is technically feasible.

The attitude above is basically arguing for a technocracy where the "lay" people just have to suck it up and accept whatever their overlords thrust on them. Hint: it's gonna be heavily weighted to those overlords making money and taking choice away.

I don't think it's elitist, it's really just HCD, no? We know that users are great at helping engineers hone in on their problems, but not so much their solutions - the whole "faster horse" thing.

There's more than one problem here, but one main one seems to be that users don't understand that incognito is more about your own computer (cookies, history) than the web's ability to do its thing.

Solutions could be anything, from do not track toggles and added incognito funtionality, to a simple visual indicating the point of incognito, to some trivial copy/branding changes.

Here's how I want encryption to work: it should be unbreakable when it's used to encrypt communication between journalists and their sources, but it should be breakable when used to encrypt communications between terrorists. I really "want [this thing] to be true". So why doesn't it work like this?

Would you ask someone random off the street to invent a COVID vaccine? To treat someone with cancer? To represent you in a homicide trial? Maybe you could get them to opine about what interest rates to set at the Fed?

We hire scientists, doctors and lawyers to do those things. No one thinks it's "elitist" to say that lay people's opinions on how to do those jobs is worse than irrelevant.

We need to accept that "computer technology" is one of those things that is simply too difficult for most people to simply intuitively know about without actually putting in the effort to understand it.

You don't think its appropriate for users to have informed consent?

No one is saying that since my father wants the tv to just know what he wants to watch, that we should even attempt to make it that way.

What the "lay people" want, if we are going to use this term, is the same privacy that the internet had 2 decades ago. It's not like things didn't work this way previously.

Two decades ago, the internet wasn't even encrypted. You're living in a fantasy history.

> The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia

Isn't this true though. If a country decided one day that 2+2=5 and wrote laws around it and enforced it then in that country you have to say 2+2=5 even if the laws of mathematics would disagree. It would be a dystopian place to live but that's just how laws work (assuming we're talking about some sort of authoritative regime where you can't challenge this law).

I think programmers are at a much greater luxury though because there is not really a thing called the laws of computer science. There are certain problems like P=NP or the halting problem but ad tracking is so far removed from that to the point that if we decided one day that it made sense to outlaw tracking, it could be done. It would kill a lot of businesses and would probably be a bad thing but to say that we shouldn't take into account lay people's wants when designing software systems is wrong.

It's not really true because Australia can't "enforce" 2+2=5, they can only punish Australians who say otherwise, which isn't meaningful enforcement.

Suppose that Australia enacts a law that says: passwords must only be accessible to the government but no one else. How can Australia reliably enforce that? Regardless of what the government decrees, other people can exploit the same backdoors that the government uses to access passwords. At most, they can punish people who do that against their wishes, but only after the password has already been accessed and only if they find out. Governments aren't omniscient or omnipotent, what they can enforce is limited by natural laws. We have yet to find a way to overcome natural laws.

If lay people are misunderstanding what incognito does, and cannot be expected to understand how it truly functions then Google shouldn't be allowed to advertise it to lay people in the way that they do.

It'd be easiest to just not provide incognito mode at all, than allow another footgun into the hands of the public at large in a way that only benefits Google.

I think though that people can be made to understand with better education and examples in a reasonable time period.

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