[48309248302]

I think that would be a disingenuous argument from Google. Google is directly receiving the analytics data and then feeding only a portion of it to the website. They know that users are easily confused and don't fully understand that one Google product doesn't respect another Google product's "privacy" settings. Most of them probably don't even know what Google Analytics is or how Google makes money by tracking them.

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

There is no 'privacy' setting being flouted, other than one that's been entirely imagined up by commenters here.

In fact, if anything people should be against this kind of interaction between two completely independent arms of Google. Isn't that what the "Break Google Up" crowd wanted?

[geofft]

Right, just imagine the outcry if Chrome were working on countermeasures for incognito mode detection but also sent a proprietary message to Google Analytics to identity when someone is in incognito mode....

[48309248302]

I'm not sure what it has to do with breaking up Google. I'm just saying that they are leading users to think that Google will stop tracking them if they turn on Google's private browsing mode.

The average user doesn't know what private browsing really mode means. If Google says you are in private browsing mode and that some other "websites and ISPs" might still track you, they aren't being clear that Google itself is still knowingly tracking you.