People still don’t know what the incognito mode does, huh
What does it do?
It opens a separate session in the browser and prevents saving any cookies, history or other state locally when you close it. Doesn’t change a blessed thing on the other end of the connection.
Most browsers even tell the users that, very clearly. I hate Google with a burning passion, but this lawsuit is just dumb.
To be fair most of the class action lawsuits these days are “dumb.” It’s important to still fight these or else nothing will change. It’s a check valve on businesses and the government to prevent them from being completely unaccountable and harming entire populations of people.
They named the feature incorrectly, then they only updated the language and explained it properly after people got in trouble or hurt because they thought it meant something different. That to me sounds like malice or at least negligence to me.
Yes the suit sounds dumb initially. However if you think about how the average person might have been misled this does sound like Google needs to be held accountable.
Does it not add to your history so you can search sketchy or embarrassing things? I never thought they weren’t tracking my rewatches of BLACK MEAT ANAL HEAT 6, just that the phrase wouldn’t show up in my search history or recently visited. I’m not going to NOT rewatch a classic like that, but I don’t need it popping up in my history when I’m about to give a presentation
Exactly that. It doesn’t save any history, and that’s pretty much it.
The name is blatantly misleading. The very definition of the term “incognito” means having one’s true identity concealed, so I can’t blame anyone with comprehension of the English language for being misled at a glance. However, like anyone else here, I do not expect this to lead to any actual progress toward more privacy.
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Fuck Google
Am I reading this right? As far as I can see, the complaint seems to be that Google would be “tracking” people even if they browse in any browser’s incognito mode.
Of course they do. If I open a private window in Firefox, and then login to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, or any other website, these websites can try to track me. How would any browser control what happens or doesn’t happen on the server side of things?
These plaintiffs would be better off sueing the companies of these websites for ignoring privacy laws and continuing to add tracking scripts to their sites.
Yes, there are browsers that try to send as little personal information as possible, like the Tor Browser, but even that one can’t disable a Facebook server’s internal logging data - how could it? All modern browsers make it quite clear what their respective incognito mode does - and what it doesn’t do.
You’re missing the fact that Google is both the company behind the most popular browser used to access content on the internet and the most popular website on the internet. Their browser says incognito mode offers protections that their website then runs roughshod over. They’re the perfect company to sue over this because the website can’t shift blame to the browser and the browser can’t shift blame to the website.
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This is a good explanation, thanks.
