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by mission_failed 969 days ago
Incognito literally means to have your real identity hidden. It seems deceptive for a company to name/market a product as 'incognito' when it is literally funnneling data to them that identifies you and links to you real identity.

Especially when the text warnings do not explicitly state that browsing data is being sent to Google and added to their tracking and marketing database about yourself.

1 comments

As far as the browser is concerned, it is not doing anything to "reveal" your identity. It won't send pre-existing cookies, won't indicate you are using Incognito Mode, and won't persist site storage outside Incognito Mode. Are you saying Incognito Mode should also send your traffic through a VPN?

I've always liked the internal name better, "off-the-record mode".

The browser isn't (aside from Chrome being much easier to fingerprint than some other browsers) but the browser vendor is doing something to reveal my identify.

I don't expect Google to control what others do, but I do expect them to control what Google does. If Google tells me I am incognito, then I should be incognito as far as Google is concerned.

But that would mean Google would have to send some kind of signal to Google's servers that you're using Incognito.

Imagine the headline:

Chrome tells Google (and only Google) when you're using Incognito mode

I'd imagine people would be even more pissed that Google is making it detectable for themselves and not others and would accuse them of being anticompetitive, even if they used it to turn off tracking for those users. They certainly wouldn't be able to turn off tracking like that for users of Private/InPrivate browsing on other browsers.

They don't have to call the feature "Incognito". If they can't deliver on what they're promising, then they should call it something that they can.