Google faces $5B lawsuit in U.S. for tracking 'private' internet use (2020)

FireFox's "Private Browsing" mode is similarly misnamed. "Private" does not imply: everyone knows what I'm doing, except my personal diary log has no record of it. Private implies other people don't know.

Would it not be a bit daft for Ford to release a "silent car" when all it means is a loud V8 engine but they give you a pair of earplugs so that you can't hear it?

I don't think so. That label was very intentionally chosen to give off a first impression different from reality, to make it more likely the user intuitively makes incorrect assumptions.

You can call it ignorance, I call it a comprehensive dark pattern. Google aimed to give users the wrong impression. And your cited list is neat but many users have no idea Google, Facebook etc. track users across different websites, and for those it's absolutely not clear what actually happens.

There's a reason Google don't mention their own collection/inferential behavior here; people might abandon Chrome is it said 'BTW if we can work out who you are at the server end we'll still be tracking that.'

It may boil down to determinations of what 'a reasonable person' believes, that is someone who is amenable to reasoned argument, and of ordinary knowledge. I think a lot of people here are projecting their technical knowledge into this page and saying 'if you don't consider all these background factors then that's your problem.' It seems like to me that a court will lean towards taking the above at face value absent specific knowledge to the contrary, eg choosing to log into an online service vs not.

A simple example would be doing some Super Secret Stuff in one incognito window and opening up another tab where you go to Youtube (also incognito), don't log in, but play your three favorite and quite unusual songs for background music. Is it OK for Youtube to silently infer that it's you based on that highly individual selection and allow Google to track your Super Secret activity with 99.9% confidence?

No, you are not.

People are only concerned about the things they can easily conceptualize. Google certainly hasn’t done anything to make it easier to understand behavioral ad targeting, probably because they didn’t want to be in this business to start with (they only moved into it during the dot com crash when they were pressured to get a business model together) and because they maintain relationships with intelligence agencies, allowing those groups to collect information they wouldn’t be able to get legally.

On several levels, Google benefits directly from hiding their real business model from the users whose behavioral information surplus they exploit.

Just because people have been slow to catch on doesn’t mean their Incognito disclosure isn’t inaccurate and downright misleading. Google doesn’t get points for hiding opt-out behind the labyrinthine settings toggles. Until the entire data collection process is opt-in, they’re exploiting user ignorance.