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Comment by thewebcount | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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