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by kllrnohj 1944 days ago
> It is placing the onus on a layperson to understand the technicalities of how third-party advertising trackers work.

No they aren't. It's spelled out entirely when you just open incognito mode. It specifically says "Chrome won't save the following information" and also specifically says "Your activity might still be visible to websites you visit"

You don't have to dig into any help articles or have deep technical knowledge of how Google Analytics works. Open up incognito and it's all right there right in front of you.

1 comments

A layperson would understand the phase "website you visit" to be the name at the top of the page. Google leaves out the fact that the vast majority of those websites you visit also include their trackers... and they do not even suggest this as a possibility unless you dig into their help articles. The initial page doesn't mention that the list of those who can track you is incomplete and is conveniently missing themselves.
A layperson also understands that when a company says "this product does X" they don't mean "everything we make does X."
Sometimes. [0] There are ways that statements can be made 100% textually correct, but semantically misleading. Other companies have done this before to mislead people, with varying degrees of legal success.[1] What a court would be interested is not whether Google is technically correct, but whether they misled people. They are in a unique position in this case to monetarily profit from misleading people, which may be something that would look bad in court.

0: For example: ask anyone who works at a helpdesk what it means when someone says "my Google doesn't work"

1: For example: Regulatory action against AT&T for "unlimited data" claims