[Terr_]

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.

[spankalee]

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.

[janalsncm]

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.

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1242019127/google-incognito-m...

[xvector]

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.

[bee_rider]

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.

[Dalewyn]

I agree, that being said I wonder what a good name would be.

Private? Other browsers also use this name, but regardless this isn't any more private than any other browser instance.

Container? Way too techno mumbo jumbo.

No Cache? Even worse pig latin.

Boxed? It's layman speak, but it doesn't convey the cacheless nature.

Forget It? No Memory? Amnesia? Cacheless to be sure, but also still open to misinterpretation.

This is an interesting exercise.

[bee_rider]

Amnesia mode seems best if we need a mode.

Or a toggle called keep/pause website history. IMO making it a “mode” makes it seem more significant than it really is.

[Terr_]

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.