The Incognito Mode Myth Has Unraveled

> If an app doesn't load, I can imagine a dozen reasons why that might be happening, and what I could do to fix it.

If you open your water tap and no water comes out, a plumber can imagine a dozen reasons why that might be happening, and what he could do to fix it...

All facets of modern life are extremely complicated and no one can know most areas beyond the very basics.

Actually it's more like as technically literate people we forget just how little we know about subjects other than computers - in this case, law. When Google, the company, offers a product marketed as "incognito", it's reasonable to think that Google, the same company, will avoid tracking users of that product - regardless of the technical details involved. The problem here wasn't Google failing to educate users of technical shortcomings that leave users vulnerable to third party surveillance, but rather Google failing to respect their own large print representation.

Honestly it’s hard to fault people for that when even if you are a tech person there are huge parts of how a computer works that you will just accept as magic because it’s too complicated to understand. For example I don’t really understand how my phone is encoding and decoding the data through RF to talk to my router and how the router can handle multiple connections over 1 band, etc. I just know the router works and the very basics of communicating over RF. Same thing with things like speculative execution- I have an idea of what my code does as the author but I have no idea which specific steps the hardware is taking to make it look like my code is being executed to me. Not even getting into things like how the OS works or how the computer draws the display or whatever. There are so many intricacies that you cannot expect even a software technical expert to completely explain what a computer is really doing when it does something at every layer except for maybe like a handful of people who make giant piles of money by being very smart.

I think the more important thing to focus on is targeted education where it matters for important topics and improvement of digital literacy so people understand things more. We should also try to get as many people as possible to properly learn how to use “real” computers, there is a generation of people growing up right now who have only ever had an iPhone as their computer and they are going to be worse than boomers when it comes to understanding technology beyond how to browse TikTok.

Users can't read, and if they could, they wouldn't

Google has been using fingerprinting (aka Detection Bits as mentioned in the settlement agreement) to identify individuals for a long but they don't implement RFP (Resist Fingerprinting) in Incognito Mode.

Thankfully there were some small wins in the settlement, otherwise one might ask what exactly the point of Incognito Mode actually is?

I suppose Google being both the browser vendor AND an Analytics provider complicates things somewhat...