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Comment by hannibalhorn | Hacker News Reader

Has this actually been verified? I don't see much in the way of evidence in the article, and Google's support entry at https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?hl=en implies that you'd have to sign into your Google account for even Google to know it was you.

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Read the article more carefully. He's saying that Google benefits from incognito mode, since it causes your normal cookie store (which contains cookies valuable to google) to persist longer than if you just habitually wiped your history.

The title should probably be something different.

That's kind of a bass-ackwards way of looking at the feature. It's an effect, sure, but ephemeral sessions are a tremendous boon to users (troubleshooting issues remotely is SO MUCH EASIER when you can ensure users don't have some weird state messing things up by having them up an ephemeral session), you'd have to be obscenely cynical to think that this was the impetus behind incognito.

I think the_watcher's top-level comment is pretty spot-on here - it's a feature that happens to be great for both parties.

OK, makes sense, but certainly sounds a bit more alarming from the title.

Ultimatley, not sure I'd agree there's a nefarious motive here. Just having the ability to let other people check their GMail / Facebook / whatever on my laptop without logging myself out is a great feature that I've often made use of.

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