[inetknght]

> It's never been misleading about what it is

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.

[KeplerBoy]

Doesn't the incognito splash screen say exactly that?

As far as I recall it was always pretty clear about not doing anything apart from not saving your browser history.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

New text: "This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google."

Old text: "Going incognito doesn’t hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider, or the websites you visit."

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com...

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...

[bee_rider]

It’s called incognito mode. Isn’t the icon a little spy or something?

The fine-print might indicate otherwise, but I think it is obvious why non-technical people were confused.

[nl]

It's not exactly fine print! It's clearly stated everytime you open an Incognito window.

Your activity might still be visible to:

Websites that you visit

Your employer or school

Your Internet service provider

There's a "Learn more" link and if it was hidden there you'd have a point, but it's hard to imagine how to make this more clear.

[caseyohara]

I'm curious, what would you call it instead?

Safari and Firefox call it "Private Browsing". I wonder if that's any better.

[bee_rider]

Maybe the button could be something along the lines of “Keep website history.”

[KeplerBoy]

More like "pause website history"

[bee_rider]

It could be a toggle, which actually would probably be more representative of the significance. Having a whole “mode” makes it seem way bigger of a difference than it actually is.

[TacticalCoder]

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."

[gretch]

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.

[bee_rider]

This doesn’t match intuition at all.

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.