If I was presiding over this case, I'd throw it out. It's never been misleading about what it is: it doesn't save stuff to your hard disk. That says nothing about remote servers.
To the tech crowd that visits HN, it's obvious what Incognito did and didn't do.
But imagine your non-technical family members. You know, the type that calls you up for tech support on a regular basis because "you know computers". Someone tells them "Hey, you should be using Incognito when doing adult activities" and then gets caught browsing adult sites on a work computer because they thought Incognito would make it invisible.
This lawsuit isn't for you and me, it's for them.
The question is, since WE know what it did, is it ethical (or even legal) for us to join the class action?
Personally, even if it was legal, and even if someone convinced me it wasn't unethical, I wouldn't do it. I don't want to risk Google being like "You joined a lawsuit against us, so we don't want to do business with you. Say goodbye to your entire Google account. This locks you out of your phone? Too damn bad."
It is pretty annoying that some folks here seem to be trying to make it into a tech competency issue or something.
I understand how it works, everybody on this site does, as you note it is obvious to anybody who knows how the internet works. Zero points for meeting the minimum standard.
But, the name is “Incognito mode.” The icon is a little spy. If somebody doesn’t understand how this is misleading to non-technical people, they might have computer literacy, but they desperately lack human literacy.
If people finding small icons and text in menus to come to incorrect conclusions about what that means is a fine and reasonable thing to expect but noting the page sized display that loads every time they click said content is a foolish error then sure, I've probably got a whole truckload of errors on the topic.
>noting the page sized display that loads every time they click said content
I kindly direct you to alarm fatigue[1], banner blindness[2], and inattentional blindness[3].
The TL;DR is that the more often and worthless a piece of information is presented, the more likely people are going to ignore it either deliberately or habitually.
The flavor text for Incognito Mode pops up every single time an Incognito window is opened and it is practically inconsequential, thus it is worthless information. People will not read it, and you should not assume people will.
It is the fault of the Chrome(ium) designers for presenting information in a way people will ignore; we've known this ever since the first guy who would insta-close every single error message while the tech support agent on the phone with him is desperately begging him to read out WTF the error says.
Tesla has been selling a "Full Self Driving" package for a decade, never delivered on their promises, and still faces zero consequences. This has mislead the gullible, some of whom are an active threat to public safety because of Tesla's marketing pap.
No, it doesn’t fit anybody’s real life intuition, because there isn’t an industry of comparing notes about the people we see (with or without disguises). If the analogy requires us to imagine a pervasive surveillance system that tracks you from the moment you leave your door, it isn’t in the intuitive experience of normal people.
Incognito clearly states how it works every time you start it, including what it doesn't protect against.
If we're saying that developers can't clearly and obviously state how things work, and are instead bound by however people think they work based on not reading anything at all, we're in a lot of trouble.
Though... can we at least then get rid of every intrusive TOS screen and cookie banner in existence? Because people click past all of those too without reading them.
If they want to blame someone for being caught watching adult content at work, blame the person who told them "Hey, you should be using Incognito when doing adult activities"
If I recall correctly, one of the problems (unless it was a different court case) involved the incestuous corporate relationship between the browser and the sites.
Customers wre using a tool provided by Google for accessing Google services (among others) and the Google tool is promising them that their activity isn't being recorded.
It isn't unreasonable for someone to believe that the promise included all those Google services and websites as well, but instead they were still being tracked and correlated etc.
The problem is that in order for Google server to not record anything about incognito sessions it would have to treat them differently from non-incognito sessions.
This would mean one of two things:
- Everyone could detect incognito mode, and many sites would refuse to work with it, defeating the purpose of it for many cases.
- Only Google could detect incognito mode, which makes it still work with other sites, but is an obvious anti-trust risk.
Google has already been proven to be an illegal monopoly. It’s not illegal to be a monopoly, it is illegal to abuse your position as a monopoly. But you are correct, controlling the search engine and the browser and the ad network put them in a precarious position from the start.
Given that they were not likely to split up their companies, they still could have avoided this lawsuit by using technical means to avoid grouping the regular profile with the incognito one. Mozilla and Apple also make browsers with incognito-like capabilities and they’re not being sued.
> The suit revealed that Google saved the standard and incognito browsing history of users in the same profile. That data was then used to inform personalized ads that the company served up.
I think this is a tech literacy problem, honestly. Lots of people don't understand the local/remote boundary. To us it's obvious, clear as night and day.
It might be caused by tech illiteracy, but at some point we have to think: A big enough chunk of the population just reads the name of things, not the description, that this becomes a problem.
Ok, maybe users are idiots. But we can either fix all of society, or… just don’t pick names like “incognito mode” or “autopilot” that require a paragraph to correct users expectations.
If it were a different web browser, then I would agree, but I feel that kind of confusion is actually just the other side of the coin for something these large companies have very deliberately gone out of their way to create and promote through branding and feature design.
When they purposefully blur the lines between products or sub-companies to create The Google Everything, it isn't fair to let them reap the rewards of confusion while evading its costs.
I would argue "incognito" is misleading when you're not actually incognito to the servers. You're still tracked by many numerous data points that defeat the concept of being incognito.
The claim of the lawyers here seems to be that because users told Google Chrome that they don't want to be tracked, they should be allowed to expect that Google knew that this user explicitly didn't want to be tracked, and that this was a Google-wide, not a local-only browser setting...
I always thought of the incognito mode as: "I can surf from incognito mode while on a friend's computer and my friend won't get my credentials / history / etc."
Actually I think the real world physical analogy does map quite well and thus isn't misleading. In real life, if you are incognito, you put on a disguise like a wig, glasses, new clothes etc and try to conceal your identity.
Incognito is not a promise from everyone else in the world not to look at you and not try to figure out who you are.
And if you pull up in the same car everywhere, then it's quite easy for observers to give you a consistent ID tag even if you are changing your wig all the time.
Losing anonymity because you go around all day in the same car and people are keeping track of you from location to location is not something people normally worry about. Spies might worry about that sort of thing, but most people don’t (maybe we should, given the state of public surveillance in some countries, but I think it is a not intuitive concern for most people).
The intent of a disguise is to, well, disguise the user. You’ve described a sort of bad disguise, like something somebody might put on in a comedy movie, but that’s because a disguise that people can easily see through is a punchline.
Incognito mode isn’t like a bad disguise anyway. It is like no disguise, it does absolutely nothing to obfuscate who you are.
Autopilot is a better name, although IMO it is still pretty bad.
* Airplane autopilot doesn’t totally handle every situation, for example it (historically at least) didn’t handle takeoff and landing.
* There was a lot of optimism around self driving cars when it was named. There might’ve been room to believe even the misunderstood full self driving idea of autopilot could be attainable.
“Incognito” just means a totally different thing from what incognito mode provides. The word has nothing to do with the feature, which is about not keeping a record for yourself of your own actions. Name it amnesia mode maybe. Blackout drunk mode.
I feel wording like "browse the web privately", the disguise icon, and the name of "incognito" could very easily suggest to a casual user that the purpose is hiding your identity from websites. There is now a disclaimer explicitly clarifying that's not the case, but not originally.
Googles privacy policy once listed it as a way to manage the privacy impact of its services without going into detail what that actually meant. They reworded it around the time the lawsuit came up.
I suppose if you don't read. If you open an incognito tab you are greeted with this text:
"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. Learn more"
> If you open an incognito tab you are greeted with this text: "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. Learn more"
They edited that because of the lawsuit.
Before the lawsuit what it said was:
"Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won’t see your activity. However, downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more"
I think it's understandable that someone would take "you can browse privately" to mean "We aren't tracking what you do"
That's incorrect, there's always been a list of entities that your behavior won't be hidden from, including "websites you visit" (worded in a couple of different ways).
Just image search Chrome incognito and pick a year to append to it, looks like someone always has a tutorial with a screenshot (and someone linked the chrome announcement video with it in a comment above)
> I just provided the original text of the snippet that was quoted.
But not all of it. From that article:
> However, the bullets beneath the incognito notice remain unchanged. These point out that browsing activity might still be visible to “Websites you visit,” “Your employer or school,” and “Your internet service provider.
The new text is probably clearer but more or less just restates the bullet points and adds "including Google".
That's why I tend to agree. IANAL and while this seems pretty simple for me to understand, I'm not certain that laypeople wouldn't also expect full anonymity based on some other aspect of the service and I'm not sure if this has been stated so succinctly since back in 2016. I think there's an argument to be made and if so, the case shouldn't been just tossed out without allowing them to make it
Agreed. Not a legal scholar so don't know how much that matters, if at all.
Though I was still disappointed to find out it was being used. I use incognito quite often to search for something I think may be questionable. No I don't need it super secret locked from the police, but it's not something I necessarily want tied to my identity/interests/Google account in any form.
But imagine your non-technical family members. You know, the type that calls you up for tech support on a regular basis because "you know computers". Someone tells them "Hey, you should be using Incognito when doing adult activities" and then gets caught browsing adult sites on a work computer because they thought Incognito would make it invisible.
This lawsuit isn't for you and me, it's for them.
The question is, since WE know what it did, is it ethical (or even legal) for us to join the class action?
Personally, even if it was legal, and even if someone convinced me it wasn't unethical, I wouldn't do it. I don't want to risk Google being like "You joined a lawsuit against us, so we don't want to do business with you. Say goodbye to your entire Google account. This locks you out of your phone? Too damn bad."