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$5 billion Google lawsuit over ‘incognito mode’ tracking moves a step closer to trial
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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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.
Also in the past I've observed that the Google indexing bot will visit a site right after a Chrome user visits the site. So if Googlebot knows nothing about abc123.com and then a Chrome user visits it, then suddenly Googlebot is crawling the site. I wonder if that happens when the Chrome user is in incognito mode?
Adding to what the other person said.
The main purpose of it is if you’re sharing the computer with someone else. You don’t need to worry about your kink searches showing up in the search history (or whatever you don’t want other people in the household to know about).