The funny part about this whole thing is that Google actively works to ensure that websites cannot tell that you are in Incognito mode. For instance, see [1] I

The funny part about this whole thing is that Google actively works to ensure that websites cannot tell that you are in Incognito mode. For instance, see [1] If Google servers have a way to detect that a request arrives using Incognito mode, then so does everyone else, which means its a bug that Google needs to fix. And if we assume that a server cannot tell you are in Incognito mode (specifically), then there is no way to turn off the normal tracking mechanisms that a website might employ. This is one of those things where it sounds like a good idea to tell websites to not track users who use Incognito, but in practice that would actually be a bad idea, because then websites would constantly tell you that you are not allowed to browse their site in Incognito, and thus no one would use it... Now, the kind of tracking that would work across independent Incognito sessions would be user fingerprinting, and using fingerprinting to bypass the desire of a user to shake off being associated with an identity is shady behavior. If the lawsuit is alleging that Google is using fingerprinting techniques to associate traffic without cookies to a common identity, well then why aren't they suing them for that? That's bad whether you use Incognito or not. The whole thing is pretty dumb. Also interesting: Assuming that Google indeed cannot tell server-side whether you are in Incognito mode, exactly what are they deleting as part of this settlement? The article does have a quote: "We are happy to delete old technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalization." I guess this means Google is just deleting old data that they were unable to associate with a person, but the entire claim was that Google was associating Incognito traffic together with a person's non-Incognito traffic- so effectively Google is doing nothing here. And yet I'm not sure what they could do. [1] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/protecting-private-browsing-chrome/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiat...