I'm not concerned about the privacy, rather, that this is a strategy to attack it indirectly. I believe that they're just trying to make life harder for those

I'm not concerned about the privacy, rather, that this is a strategy to attack it indirectly. I believe that they're just trying to make life harder for those who browse in private mode, in order to push them to always stay logged in. After all, Google built a browser based on the concept of user being logged in (this was one of the primary reasons why I've moved from Chrome). This is nothing new, as at least some news paper had explicitly rules against it, for a long time. On an extreme and hopefully far fetched scenario, I image this becoming common practice, and Google says that you have only a certain amount of searches before you must log in. I think the current situation as a sort of middle ground (or step towards).