Hacker News Reader

Comment by kotlin2 | Hacker News Reader

It’s pretty damning for Google, the company, which clearly had knowledge they were misrepresenting “incognito mode”. Whether or not it’s damning for the individual engineers is a matter of debate, likely depending on whether or not they worked on the feature or if they had the ability to do anything about it.

View on HN

As others have pointed out, that's pretty nonsense. When you open an "incognito" tab it says right there:

  "Your activity might still be visible to:
  Websites that you visit
  Your employer or school
  Your Internet service provider"

Not exactly ambiguous or misrepresentative. It's for browsing porn without your spouse knowing. That's about it.

I occasionally use it for sites that uMatrix is a bit too aggressive with.

On Mobile Safari I use private browsing for my kid's youtube, so my recommendations aren't full of minecraft videos. But now that I think of it, it might be fun to teach youtube that people who watch minecraft videos are also interested in type theory and Edward Kmett videos.

Don't expect much. My YouTube feed is full of Terraria and Minecraft and Skyrim thanks to my son... mixed with CMU Database CS lectures, telemark skiing, gardening, and LoTR mythology videos, but let me tell you that YouTube has failed to syncretize anything interesting from this fusion :-)

It still surprises me that 100% of HN people aren't using ublock...

> alleges the Silicon Valley giant misled the public about how much data it collects from users even when they're in its Chrome browser's "Incognito" private browsing mode.

That warning doesn't include Google tracking you as well.

The internal controversy seems to be that it doesn’t warn that your activity is still visible to Google (for ad targeting and conversion tracking). Which is arguably much less obvious.

Reread what they said. The only thing incognito ever offered was not saving local history.

That seems to be covered by "Your activity might still be visible to: Websites that you visit"?

It's tracked by Google even if you never visit a page operated by Google. Non-Google websites that include Google tracking are contributing here (which is most of the web).

The sentence you cite suggests that it's "just" such sites that see your activity, while it's a third party (Google) that does as well and that is the issue here.

Sure, technically you could argue that the tracking is "part" of the website that you visit, so it's technically still "only" the site that's tracking you. But let's be honest here, no reasonable non-hair-splitting non-geek would read it that way.

Thank you for pointing this out. It's strange the contortions other posters here are going through to pretend that a normal person wouldn't understand that when Google tells you're in incognito mode, Google still tracks you. If I put Firefox in private mode, I'm pretty sure the Mozilla Foundation doesn't get to see a bunch of my activity. It's pretty simple.

But Google only tracks you if the website you visit belongs to Google or the website uses something Google Analytics. In either case, it's explicit in how Google gets your information.

Is there other ways Google is tracking you in incognito mode? Additionally, there's other websites like Meta or things like Fullstory, segment, or really any third party tracking that gathers data in the same way GA does.

But you’re also using a Google product that markets itself as allowing you to browse “incognito” and its own engineers admit it’s a terrible name because it’s super misleading. Basically, Google is trying to have its cake and eat it too.

> or the website uses something Google Analytics

Right, so only just about every website on the planet.

> In either case, it's explicit in how Google gets your information.

It's not explicit at all. The vast majority of users would not understand that's happening when they're in incognito mode.

Curious, what would you have google do?

Disable GA tracking when in incognito, and if so, how should they handle other tracking scripts?

Possibly they could try to explain to the user what GA is, but I imagine if users don’t understand the internet already, this isn’t easy to explain.

That's true regardless and not the issue. The issue is calling it 'Incognito Mode' and implying it offers the same privacy protection as other browsers' private modes, like Firefox's private mode for example, when in fact it doesn't. It's a standard feature on modern browsers and Google intentionally misled it's users that Chrome offered a comparable feature. Users had understandably assumed Chrome's privacy feature did in fact provide the same level of privacy they would expect from other modern browsers. It would be like me selling you new brakes for your car and telling you there is always a possibility brakes can fail when in fact they didn't work to begin with and would have never stopped your car. One is common sense advice, the other is fraud.

What does Firefox's private mode do that Chrome's doesn't?

block cross site trackers and scripts https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

Doesn't incognito mode predate Private Browsing in Firefox? Also, what's the distinction? The Firefox documentation doesn't make their feature seem particularly different:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-myths-about-priv...

> Myth 1: Private Browsing makes you anonymous on the Internet

> Reality: Private Browsing does not mask your identity or activity online.

google tracks your incognito tabs just like it tracks normal tabs, without you even visiting google.com

> It's for browsing porn without your spouse knowing. That's about it.

#notallspouses!

It's for being able to open a tab while screen-sharing with strangers (colleagues, friends) without the browser suggesting porn sites with matching keywords.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com