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They didn't mix anything up, rather they asserted the definition of reasonable being employed by Google was wrong. You say you offer an incognito mode. Google

They didn't mix anything up, rather they asserted the definition of reasonable being employed by Google was wrong. You say you offer an incognito mode. Google says it's clear to everyone that they and everyone else it's okay to and normal to track you through it. Everyone else goes "that's not reasonable at all". This is basically Google saying "Well, it was a good run while it lasted."

deleted 3y ago
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Legend2440 3y ago
No, what’s not reasonable is expecting websites to change their behavior in any way because you’re in incognito mode. They will do all the same tracking they always do, because they neither know or care what mode your browser’s in.
- salawat 3y ago
  It's in fact perfectly reasonable to expect it when combined with an asserted DNT bit. Also, given the years of technical discourse on this very forum on how to tell "is someone incognito'd" by fingerprinting and trying to track them regardless. Maybe you have a pony in this rodeo you don't want to change. That's fair. However, I held the entire rodeo in the first place was illegitimate. User tracking/cross-site data harvesting/tracking pixels should all have been legally strangled before an absurd number of people were unjustifiabpy enriched by selling something they had no business collecting in the first place. There are a non-trivial number of like-minded individuals who feel the same in both our cases, and by settling,.Google handily mooted the question for now.
  - kccqzy 3y ago
    Now that you say "combined with an asserted DNT bit" I can see where your confusion comes from. Incognito mode doesn't imply DNT. But I can see many non-technical users (as well as technical users who purposefully muddy the waters) equating Incognito mode with the DNT bit, and equating the DNT bit to be a legally binding request to the website not to track them.
kccqzy 3y ago
Of course it's okay and normal for a website to track a user even when they put their browser in Incognito mode. Anyone not understanding that is either not being reasonable in the first place, or so ignorant about the basics of the web that their opinion is not worth listening to.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  So, you've just hit on a weakness of the legal "reasonable person principle" and, possibly, the reason Google decided to settle this case. By settling, they've left the legal question of what a "reasonable person" should expect here open. If someone else wants to sue later over this term or some related term maybe having a different layperson meaning, they can but they're back to square one: new case, new facts, no precedent. Had Google dragged this out, and the Court concluded that a "reasonable person" believed "incognito" meant something other than what every tech-head has understood it to mean for the past sixteen years... The industry would have been in for a world of hurt.

deleted 3y ago

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Legend2440 3y ago

No, what’s not reasonable is expecting websites to change their behavior in any way because you’re in incognito mode. They will do all the same tracking they always do, because they neither know or care what mode your browser’s in.

salawat 3y ago
It's in fact perfectly reasonable to expect it when combined with an asserted DNT bit. Also, given the years of technical discourse on this very forum on how to tell "is someone incognito'd" by fingerprinting and trying to track them regardless. Maybe you have a pony in this rodeo you don't want to change. That's fair. However, I held the entire rodeo in the first place was illegitimate. User tracking/cross-site data harvesting/tracking pixels should all have been legally strangled before an absurd number of people were unjustifiabpy enriched by selling something they had no business collecting in the first place. There are a non-trivial number of like-minded individuals who feel the same in both our cases, and by settling,.Google handily mooted the question for now.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  Now that you say "combined with an asserted DNT bit" I can see where your confusion comes from. Incognito mode doesn't imply DNT. But I can see many non-technical users (as well as technical users who purposefully muddy the waters) equating Incognito mode with the DNT bit, and equating the DNT bit to be a legally binding request to the website not to track them.

kccqzy 3y ago

Of course it's okay and normal for a website to track a user even when they put their browser in Incognito mode. Anyone not understanding that is either not being reasonable in the first place, or so ignorant about the basics of the web that their opinion is not worth listening to.

shadowgovt 3y ago
So, you've just hit on a weakness of the legal "reasonable person principle" and, possibly, the reason Google decided to settle this case. By settling, they've left the legal question of what a "reasonable person" should expect here open. If someone else wants to sue later over this term or some related term maybe having a different layperson meaning, they can but they're back to square one: new case, new facts, no precedent. Had Google dragged this out, and the Court concluded that a "reasonable person" believed "incognito" meant something other than what every tech-head has understood it to mean for the past sixteen years... The industry would have been in for a world of hurt.