I thought it was well understood that "private" mode in browsers relates to what your local machine records about where you visit.
I didn't even think that a web site could know you were in that mode, let alone honour it.
I didn't even think that a web site could know you were in that mode, let alone honour it.
The fact that they now basically say "cookies or not, we're gonna track you anyway" sounds to me like another step in the downfall of Google.
Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was it destroyed by a single incident or individual.
The downfall of empires gradually happens over years... decades...
But make no mistake: the sign of the first derivative is negative.
Any day now though, right?
Yeah, that's what it does. Instead you get a new set of tracking cookies, because to Google and any other random website you look like a new browser they haven't seen before. By design, they have no idea that you're using "incognito mode".
With that in mind, what do you think Google and others should do differently?
Bonus 3) Lobby congress to make it illegal to disrespect the DNT header.
Your other idea is interesting. Google should lobby for regulations that would hurt their competitors far more than them. You wouldn't regard this as a big company engaging in regulatory capture?
It sounds like you've already decided that the tracking free-for-all status quo is the best we can do.
No, it’s an explicit instruction. It’s treated as a suggestion, at best. It’s not “It’d be real nice if you didn’t track”, it’s “Do not track.”
There’s nothing ambiguous about it.
The defence of Google is “well everyone else is doing it”, which isn’t a particularly strong defence, for Google, nor all the other shady businesses engaging in this practice.
My point is not that Google is good or bad or that all the other kids are doing it. My point is that DNT is at current fundamentally incapable of delivering what we're asking it to do.
It’s absolutely observable between the two parties that are engaged in the conversation, as it’s part of the HTTP header:
DNT: 1
Let's go with a change of phrase, then. What's the practical difference between suggestion and a clear and explicit instruction that is unenforceable and where the user offering the instruction cannot tell if it is being executed faithfully?
Unless Google Chrome is still associating your incognito activity to your main account, and who knows which of their products feed off your browsing history…
Er, no…
I've yet to see anything so much as suggesting that Google is using that kind of Chrome user local data to track people. Did I miss that?
I think the parent is suggesting that they reassociate the incognito tracking cookies with the users' other data from their logged in session by using other fingerprinting techniques.
I don't know whether Google actually does this. Clearly they are capable of doing so, and anybody who cares about privacy should assume it happens, but it's not obvious to me that this kind of data association would be worth it for advertisers.
There's nothing in the court case Google is responding to about them using other tracking systems. People seem to want to believe very much there's lots of backchannel tracking & special privilege & self dealing going on at Google. But theres no evidence, there's people vehemently swearing Google does have strong internal information firewalling to prevent this abuse, and it's not what this court case is about.
The court case is about users expecting incognito to be a magic cloaking shield where anything you do on the web in incognito magically doesn't stuck around after the fact.
Google can use _at least_ the combination of this and my browser UA to track me should they so desire. (There may be other persistent cookie-like things, who knows.)
This new prompt is them admitting that they do. I would rather that they chose not to.
My understanding is that incognito mode is a temporary and blank profile that is cleared when you exit. If it actually prohibited cookies a large number of websites wouldn't work as session information is used in all kinds of contexts (not just advertising). AFAIK there's no special treatment for incognito as the site owner shouldn't be able to tell an incognito user from a new never-seen-before user. Each time you exit and relaunch incognito you will get the same behavior as a new user.
There have been tricks over the years for website owners to try and deduce the browser is incognito (e.g. testing available scratch space in the JS file API). In general this is a cat and mouse game where gaps are closed and new fingerprinting methods are developed.
In terms of location tracking, websites are still getting your IP address which can be geo mapped. If they want the location from your browser, you should be getting prompted to allow/block.
"Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won’t change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google."
It's pretty clear that the text is not "admitting" what you claim it is, you've just made that all up.
I bet 99% of the people who use Chrome don't even really understand what a browser is or the difference between remote and local.
> I didn't even think that a web site could know you were in that mode, let alone honour it.
Well, except if you're Google and you own both the website the user visits and the browser used for the visit.
wanna bet?
They never revisited that assumption and might have passed it down to newer users as well.
They never revisited that assumption because they never had any beliefs at all regarding user agents. You're significantly overestimating how much the general public knows about this topic.
(I think the usual term among the people developing the feature was actually "pr0n mode", but I may be wrong and/or misremembering. For the avoidance of doubt, I was not one of those people, I'm just describing what I think I remember seeing on the interwebs at the time.)
Those who don't know how the internet works could be easily confused by the term.
Those who know anything about the internet's workings wouldn't even think to ask if the feature cloaked your online activity from sites you were visiting, because that's not even a thing a client can do.
I was surprised that Google settled a $5 billion lawsuit accusing it of illegally tracking users while in that mode.
The only thing I can think of is that they might have misled users about the degree of privacy they could expect in that mode. Like, if they said "you won't be tracked" and then they did.
Still, the technology of private mode browsing is not unique to Google and it all does the same thing: not record locally what you do.