[chungy]

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"

[autoexec]

> 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"

[magicalist]

> Before the lawsuit what it said was

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)

[autoexec]

I just provided the original text of the snippet that was quoted.

you can see the difference for yourself: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24039883/google-incognito...

[magicalist]

> 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".

[conductr]

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

[bee_rider]

The fact that they had to add that disclaimer indicates that people were mislead by the more obvious interpretation of the word “incognito.”