Incognito mode is fine. It doesn't persist data, it doesn't give websites access to existing main-profile data (cookies, etc), and it actually honors the settings of the profile it was spawned from.
None of this robustly prevents fingerprinting, but neither does switching to another browser or wiping your profile clean. There's just a bunch of system and network characteristics that leak info because of how the web is designed. Google didn't make it so and I don't think they're using it to serve you ads.
I think two things can simultaneously be true. Google's privacy practices aren't great, and they weren't actually doing anything that a reasonable person wouldn't expect to be happening in incognito. This was a lawsuit filed to shake them down, not to benefit the consumer. And apparently, it was flimsy enough that it started with a $5B demand, and is ending with no payout at all.
I'm by no means an expert, but doesn't the Mullvad browser in combination with a (trusted) VPN robustly prevent fingerprinting? It got a pretty good response when it was posted here a while ago. I'd be interested to know by someone more knowledgeable just how robustly it prevents fingerprinting.
But you're the idiot if you expected words to have meaning.
"""Others who use this device won’t see your activity."""
Seems like plain language to me. Anyone who thought this feature was hiding them from the websites they were visiting simply imagined that.
"Personal configuration and activity": where in the HTTP request or JavaScript API is that? What data are we talking about?
IP address, obviously, but that's not news. Or is this about browser fingerprinting?
Personal configuration: for example a website can query whether a user prefers dark mode or light mode. Incognito browsing doesn't attempt to hide that. Or consider that you have a fairly unique browser window size accessible using window.{inner,outer}{Width,Height}. Incognito also doesn't hide it from websites.
None of this is inherently newsworthy. It's only newsworthy because people misunderstood Incognito and filed a lawsuit. I'd say that people seemed to have mixed up the privacy offered by the Tor browser and the privacy offered by Incognito at some point.
You say you offer an incognito mode. Google says it's clear to everyone that they and everyone else it's okay to and normal to track you through it.
Everyone else goes "that's not reasonable at all".
This is basically Google saying "Well, it was a good run while it lasted."
They will do all the same tracking they always do, because they neither know or care what mode your browser’s in.
Maybe you have a pony in this rodeo you don't want to change. That's fair. However, I held the entire rodeo in the first place was illegitimate. User tracking/cross-site data harvesting/tracking pixels should all have been legally strangled before an absurd number of people were unjustifiabpy enriched by selling something they had no business collecting in the first place.
There are a non-trivial number of like-minded individuals who feel the same in both our cases, and by settling,.Google handily mooted the question for now.
By settling, they've left the legal question of what a "reasonable person" should expect here open. If someone else wants to sue later over this term or some related term maybe having a different layperson meaning, they can but they're back to square one: new case, new facts, no precedent.
Had Google dragged this out, and the Court concluded that a "reasonable person" believed "incognito" meant something other than what every tech-head has understood it to mean for the past sixteen years... The industry would have been in for a world of hurt.
Increasingly, the world assumes that all three of the above are true for everyone, and anyone else gets marginalized.
Smart people I’ve spoken to have no idea about browser finger printing!
Still amazes me that Tor exists simply to hide American (and no doubt other Five-Eyes) spies among the ‘privacy advocates’ and others.
I admit, I used to believe in the ‘Tor mission’ for years and years.
Some of that is done by inspecting the shape of packets but to figure out if, for example, a sudden spike in QPS is a legit novel interest in the data stored at the resource or a DDOS attack, Cloudflare's automated system will try to figure out if multiple incoming requests are actually from the same source and will throttle them all if they're determined to be hostile. Because, well, that's how you guard against DDOS in an automated fashion.
And in the middle, when Cloudflare can't determine the shape of the incoming traffic, it'll hit it with more scrutiny to check if it's automated. So if you're browsing with Tor, Cloudflare doesn't have a history on your requests to decide if they have a good past-behavior pedigree, so it ups the scrutiny: it'll try to cookie you and it'll throw up more CAPTCHAs to make you prove you're a legit human user of Tor and not someone trying to use Tor to hide a DDOS.
As a Mage: The Ascension & Mage: The Awakening tabletop game fan, this attempt to cast ritual legal magic to grant everyone a reasonable level of Arcane is pretty cool. But it's definitely magic that the group is hoping for.
A more appropriate thing to do however is to use a different browser altogether like Edge for such things and using it's incognito mode + some VPN protection do do whatever secret stuff you do. Even that does not give you full protection. Only the level of sophistication to beat your privacy goes up.
Guest mode is wildly insufficient for actual privacy. Something like brave is about as good as a layman can do, and brave + vpn is reasonably private.
Most of privacy, however, is going to come down to hygiene. It doesn't matter how private your operations are after you sign in to google.com to check your email or facebook.com to dish out some uplikes.
If you really want to keep your browsing private, you should be using a browser that doesn’t make its money by knowing everything about you
Or a completely separate browser. Or at least a separate profile.
Browsing Amazon in private mode with Firefox, or, hell, Hacker News in Edge's InPrivate mode, you'd have the same issue. None of those modulate what Hacker News knows about you.
Firefox won't implement cohort user tracking. if they do, probably not in incognito like chrome, which just sets a new set.
Firefox doesn't preload hundreds of links from the page your reading, using google's dns serves despite your dns settings.
so many reasons that people here just ignore and pretend they know anything at all about browsers today.
Since "incognito" literally means "with one's identity concealed" [1], the fact that this was allegedly never intended to be a browsing mode that concealed one's identity is absurdly dishonest.
You developers who work on this sort of crap should be ashamed of yourselves.
The Honest* Browser *disclaimer: may lie
Also worth considering that dictionary definitions aside, things can mean different things to different people. As a silly example, we can consider the :) emoji. Apparently many young people think it is passive aggressive [0]. To me, it is just a smiley face. So, I'd argue contextual definitions are useful.
[0] - https://www.google.com/search?q=smiley+emoji+passive+aggress...
General comprehension of the term changed because usage patterns changed.
Now it means only you and a slew of corporations and government agencies from all over the planet, can know what you're doing and the data is stored in a massive database for eternity.
Seclusion from the knowledge and observation of others is still a worthwhile endeavor and I sorely miss it. It is very difficult to nurture your own mind when your body is constantly "on the record".
...then don't use a browser built by an ad company!