“He’s the one who knocks!”
Incognito was never about privacy. It’s about hiding your seach history from your parents or partner or whatever
For buying gifts, for example.
Or masturbating to pornography
Or buying pornography.
Or pornographic gifts.
“Ma’am, I heard it’s your birthday, so I brought this giant package…”
That’s adorable.
I don’t believe for a second that they are actually going to delete any data they stole from users.
Oops offshore backup mysteriously occurred.
Of course they will! First you make a copy, then you delete the copy. Contractual terms satisfied.
The raw data might be purged but no one talks about the ML modal that google trained with that data.
UPDATE disgustingly_detailed_data SET deleted = true WHERE inkognito = true;To be fair nothing was stolen, the lawyers even admitted as much.
This is a user error problem caused by the moron in a hurry problem.
The warning on incognito mode both before and after the change was very explicit that it was local only. It was intended for people sharing a computer, not for privacy to anything you searched, external websites, etc
Below the warning even had examples over exactly what was and was not saved with it explicitly saying that external websites would be able to track and save your data including Google.
The change was to add that warning list to the initial warning itself because Google had assumed people would read the entire page. They did not.
Which means that those morons in a hurry who only skimmed misunderstood what incognito mode was for. Did not read the use case, the warning, the TOs, the manual, or any other information provided both explicitly or implicitly.
Hell even parted the argument of the lawyers was that this is a user issue and that Google had a responsibility to prevent people who were ignorant or in a hurry from misunderstanding. And while they made a good faith effort, it could have been better. Google being the large company is taking the fall for this more than anything but it is at the end of the day a user issue.
Incognito was literally only good for opening a second session without you logged in. It did zero for privacy. Even their disclaimer said so.
Incognito, you mean porn mode?
Its a moot point once you sign into your Facebook account to “share with friends”
Apparently we consume porn in vastly different ways.
firefox containers are amazing for this
Firefox -p “Spanky”
Except it only keeps cookies separated, history is shared over all containers.
Incognito/Private Browsing came about when people were sharing computers more often. It doesn’t save history and cookies and whatnot on your device. It’s to prevent the next user from getting in to your bank account.
Google and whoever else will still know your IP and can use that to cross-reference whatever other data they have on you.
I use private, because I am a tab hoarder
You guys are still using Chrome?
Incognito mode was always just to hide your local browser history. Think Google would NOT track you?
Do you have Google maps? They know where you are at all times.
User visits Google (logged in)
User visits Google, without cookies, but from the same IP, same user agent, same resolution, same OS, same enabled plugins, same browser version number, same fingerprint (based on al the previous information).
Google, who could this possibly be???
You mean…they know I typed “boobs” into the search bar that one time!? NOOOO!!
Do you have a phone? They know where your toilet is
The know when I’m in a theatre and automatically mute my phone. Admittedly convenient, but also super creepy
I’ve never had this happen. I need to NOT mute my phone next time and test!
Naming it incognito was a mistake. It was always clear to me all incognito is, is a non persistent container to keep your browsing data separate from your regular browsing data. All its hiding is your porn browsing habits from your mom. But of course, the name implies much more.
Good for testing instead of “clearing cache and cookies”
There were memes about this what feels like at least 10 years ago. Makes perfect sense when you think about it.
Some ones been caught with his pants down 😏
Not a mistake, intentionally deceptive
from your mom
…did your parents not have friends set up packet sniffers?
“Hey, so now that Chrome has been released, we’re gonna fly up to visit your son and install a packet sniffer on his network!”
Your parents seriously didnt do that, though?
I’m just gently teasing you because I was 29 years old when Chrome came out. My parents would never have even thought to ask someone to install something like that when the internet first came out.
hey before they do that, can i look through their files on me? theres some porn i havent been able to refind anywhere
Wouldn’t that be amazing! I have single frames of good videos stuck in my head that I can never find again.
There is a r/tipofmypenis for that
Maybe someone knows a Lemmy alternative
Um was this surprising to anyone? I think we all assumed that this was the case no???
Doesn’t it specifically say on a new incognito tab that this doesn’t protect against sites or service providers from gathering information…and only stops you from storing local information (history, cookies, etc)? Do people actually think that incognito is adding privacy protection?
That was actually a result of this issue, where Google placed misleading statements in incognito and then proceeded to actively go around them.
It actually had bullet points below the initial warning that said websites could track you.
The big warning on top was fine before. It could have been worded better and the update made its wording better. But below that warning it’s always had bullet points over examples of what it would and would not save in website tracking as well as browser data from searches could be saved. Sure, they didn’t explicitly say Google would save your data, but Google being a web browser falls under that bullet point and Google being a website falls under that bullet point. A website falls under that bullet point.
This is people not being able to understand what words mean.
It has somewhat of a privacy protection because it’s incapable of keeping cookies. The bar is in hell, but it passed it.
Maybe I read it wrong but (to me) the meme makes it sound like Google’s taking the local data (that’s supposed to be forgotten, once you close the browser window) and sending it over to Google for them to, I dunno, run analysis on.
If they’re saying that Google sites (like YouTube, Google search, etc.) were collecting data when I visit them (as, unfortunately, sites do), then I’d say, “Well, duh;” but this makes it seem like they were exporting your local data off to their cloud which, like, they could obviously, technically do but wouldn’t very much be in the spirit of how Incognito mode was portrayed.
I think the techno illiterate boomers of the fediverse are probably flabbergasted
You’ve gone Incognito. Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won’t change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google. Downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved.
- Google Chrome
Ah, good find. I just assumed it would have been explicit about it from the start
Yeah, one would have hoped that’d be the case - but apparently not.
I just remembered reading this a while back (start of last year, it seems?), and it honestly felt like a tacit admission of wrong-doing - so they’re likely going to be facing an uphill battle, or at least are expecting one.
Even before that change it’s explicit about it… The change literally did not change any part of the text that tells you who can and are going to track you. They basically went from “this isn’t real privacy” to screaming at your face cause apparently people can’t read and are idiots.
This is a case of users misusing a tool and not reading. At best you can argue that google should have assumed it’s users were stupid beyond measure from the start and had a tos so verbose that only someone missing a brain could misunderstand the point of the tool.
Man, even then it was clear what it was doing, are they supposed to list every single website you visit that might track you?
wtf was anyone expecting
I haven’t used Chrome in years. Brave and firefox, that’s my crowd.
Brave is also Chromium.
Correct. But it is not the same.
Which is why i don’t use safebrowsing but rather a separate profile located (
--profileswitch) in XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.Librewolf
same i use Librewolf nowadays
I use chrome once or twice a year, when I need to figure out if a website problem is my browser or the site.
Ironically, I use incognito for that.
The Google Incognito tab in any browser clarifies that while it prevents your browsing history from being saved on your device, it does not make your browsing completely private.
Websites you visit, your employer (if on a work network), and your internet service provider (ISP) can still track your online activity.
Hell it even has a link that leads directly to the privacy policy
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/9845881?hl=en-GB
The only thing that shocks me is that no one ever reads it
This was silently changed it used not to have the disclaimer sentence
Silently? It’s been available for developers since January 2024. Major antivirus and security websites reported on it since then, to count:
https://adguard.com/en/blog/incognito-mode-disclaimer-change.html.
It’s been widely reported at least since March 2024. It’s been well over a year since that
Hell even this meme is outdated, as the settlement is widely known since April 2024
So I wouldn’t get why freak out like after a year?
Incognito mode (Chrome) and Private mode (Safari/Firefox) and InPrivate Browsing (Edge/IE) have had disclaimers/explanations for years, Chrome just expanded the disclaimer after settling the suit. Unfortunately for them the judge didn’t know how the internet works any better than the plaintiffs. Winding back the odometer on a car doesn’t mean toll roads don’t know you drove there, it just means “you” have no record of it.
Opera / Vivaldi offer an integrated VPN, but they’re about the only ones other than stuff like the Tor Browser.
I need to check into this, but maybe someone knows.
I assumed that if you’re using incognito and you don’t sign into your Google account, the activity wouldn’t be tied to your Google account. It might be recorded and sent to Google, but anonymously, unless you signed into Google/Gmail/YouTube/whatever, while incognito.
The obvious is that your activity wouldn’t end up on your Internet history in your non-incognito Chrome.
Incognito was never about hiding your data from Google, it was always about preventing random websites from getting your data
It doesn’t even do that. All it does is prevent persistent data from being stored from the browsing session (so, no disk cache or browsing history).
Except the part where all incognito tabs/windows share the same session.
We need an incognito mode for the incognito mode.
From day one it is explicitly said it doesn’t do that. It’s literally always been on the main blank tab page right below the warning over what it does.
How they even had to update the wording because of all of this because people didn’t bother to read three bullet points
