I feel like I’m the only one that remembers that incognito mode was only ever about keeping your browsing history private on the local machine, not anonymizing all your internet traffic.
People misunderstand the lawsuit so badly. It was about misleading statements made on the browser by Google while the company did other things to break those statements. It is NOT about them somehow secretly sophoning off browsing data, which they didn’t do.
Well yeah, that’s all it ever was. The lawsuit was because of misleading/deceptive statements made by Google, which led some (intentionally misinformed) users to believe that Incognito Mode was more private than reality.
Basically, the company knew some users believed Incognito Mode hid their browsing activity. Not just from their local machine (via no logged site history, clearing cookies, etc), but also by hiding it from prying eyes like Google. Some users genuinely believed Incognito Mode was basically some sort of combination of Tor, degoogling, VPN, tracker-blocker, etc… And Google actively encouraged this incorrect belief, because they could continue to siphon off users’ data when they thought they weren’t being watched. The active encouragement of incorrect beliefs is what the lawsuit was about, not the data collection.
In the ancient days, before the early 2000s there were no user and account management in webbrowsers at all. You started the browser and when you were done you closed it. If you wanted to hide your traces you could manually delete your history. Remember at that time this was on “the family computer”. So your wife or mother used the same machine and could find your history.
This was the situation when incognito mode was introduced, if you used the internet at that time it was perfectly reasonable, and you knew what it meant.
It just happened that a generation grew up who didn’t know how it worked and they assumed it’s different.
I feel like I’m the only one that remembers that incognito mode was only ever about keeping your browsing history private on the local machine, not anonymizing all your internet traffic.
It literally tells you that when you open an incognito tab.
People are just both tech illiterate and regular illiterate. And instead of taking responsibility, blame someone else.
Exactly what you said. Personally I’d add “willfully” in front of each type of illiterate, but that’s just me.
People misunderstand the lawsuit so badly. It was about misleading statements made on the browser by Google while the company did other things to break those statements. It is NOT about them somehow secretly sophoning off browsing data, which they didn’t do.
Well yeah, that’s all it ever was. The lawsuit was because of misleading/deceptive statements made by Google, which led some (intentionally misinformed) users to believe that Incognito Mode was more private than reality.
Basically, the company knew some users believed Incognito Mode hid their browsing activity. Not just from their local machine (via no logged site history, clearing cookies, etc), but also by hiding it from prying eyes like Google. Some users genuinely believed Incognito Mode was basically some sort of combination of Tor, degoogling, VPN, tracker-blocker, etc… And Google actively encouraged this incorrect belief, because they could continue to siphon off users’ data when they thought they weren’t being watched. The active encouragement of incorrect beliefs is what the lawsuit was about, not the data collection.
Did it ever change to not being about keeping your browsing history private on the local machine?
In the ancient days, before the early 2000s there were no user and account management in webbrowsers at all. You started the browser and when you were done you closed it. If you wanted to hide your traces you could manually delete your history. Remember at that time this was on “the family computer”. So your wife or mother used the same machine and could find your history.
This was the situation when incognito mode was introduced, if you used the internet at that time it was perfectly reasonable, and you knew what it meant.
It just happened that a generation grew up who didn’t know how it worked and they assumed it’s different.