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All private mode does is prevent family friends from knowing what porn you watch. It's useless for real "privacy"

the_af 6y ago
Indeed. Even worse, Chrome calls this "incognito mode", which is even less accurate. This isn't incognito. The joke about calling it "porn mode" was way more honest.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It's about as incognito as throwing on the hat and glasses the icon shows is. i.e. "works until someone actually cares enough to take active measures to track you."
  - jgwil2 6y ago
    To be fair, right below said icon it gives a pretty clear explanation of what it does and who could still track your activity.
tialaramex 6y ago
Systems intended to "learn" your preferences won't accumulate preferences in the private window. Could they? Probably yeah, but they don't, and that's valuable. If someone asks me about a sovereign citizen video on Youtube I can watch it in a Private window without filling my YT suggestions with sov cit crap for the next week. It's also really useful for testing. For example building my WebAuthn implementation I hit "Cancel" a lot. In your ordinary session the browser soon remembers this site tried a WebAuthn registration, the user hit "Cancel" so let's suppress that because it'd be annoying if sites harass you with such requests over and over. Subsequent attempts soon just silently fail - that makes it really annoying to debug the backend. Maybe a refresh will fix it? Maybe I should wait five minutes? Who knows. But the browser intentionally doesn't remember what happens in a Private window. I can hit Cancel to check that works as expected, then open a fresh Private window and registration still works fine there instead of silently failing. Likewise I had a Cookie bug, where a typo meant enduring session cookies that were supposed to be cleared sometimes weren't. Private windows don't preserve cookies, so I could walk through all the steps to reproduce from a "fresh start", try something, then just throw that Private window away and make a new one for the next experiment. None of this is impossible without Private windows of course, but it was more inconvenient when we didn't have them.

Indeed. Even worse, Chrome calls this "incognito mode", which is even less accurate. This isn't incognito. The joke about calling it "porn mode" was way more honest.

shadowgovt 6y ago
It's about as incognito as throwing on the hat and glasses the icon shows is. i.e. "works until someone actually cares enough to take active measures to track you."
- jgwil2 6y ago
  To be fair, right below said icon it gives a pretty clear explanation of what it does and who could still track your activity.

tialaramex 6y ago

Systems intended to "learn" your preferences won't accumulate preferences in the private window. Could they? Probably yeah, but they don't, and that's valuable. If someone asks me about a sovereign citizen video on Youtube I can watch it in a Private window without filling my YT suggestions with sov cit crap for the next week. It's also really useful for testing. For example building my WebAuthn implementation I hit "Cancel" a lot. In your ordinary session the browser soon remembers this site tried a WebAuthn registration, the user hit "Cancel" so let's suppress that because it'd be annoying if sites harass you with such requests over and over. Subsequent attempts soon just silently fail - that makes it really annoying to debug the backend. Maybe a refresh will fix it? Maybe I should wait five minutes? Who knows. But the browser intentionally doesn't remember what happens in a Private window. I can hit Cancel to check that works as expected, then open a fresh Private window and registration still works fine there instead of silently failing. Likewise I had a Cookie bug, where a typo meant enduring session cookies that were supposed to be cleared sometimes weren't. Private windows don't preserve cookies, so I could walk through all the steps to reproduce from a "fresh start", try something, then just throw that Private window away and make a new one for the next experiment. None of this is impossible without Private windows of course, but it was more inconvenient when we didn't have them.