5 ms·

If I was presiding over this case, I'd throw it out. It's never been misleading about what it is: it doesn't save stuff to your hard disk. That says nothing abo

by chungy 2y ago

If I was presiding over this case, I'd throw it out. It's never been misleading about what it is: it doesn't save stuff to your hard disk. That says nothing about remote servers.

conductr 2y ago
Yes I tend to agree although the word "incognito" conveys something that it is not, so one could argue the very premise of it is misleading
- chungy 2y ago
  I suppose if you don't read. If you open an incognito tab you are greeted with this text: "You’ve gone Incognito Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google. Downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more"
  - conductr 2y ago
    That's why I tend to agree. IANAL and while this seems pretty simple for me to understand, I'm not certain that laypeople wouldn't also expect full anonymity based on some other aspect of the service and I'm not sure if this has been stated so succinctly since back in 2016. I think there's an argument to be made and if so, the case shouldn't been just tossed out without allowing them to make it
  - autoexec 2y ago
    > If you open an incognito tab you are greeted with this text: "You’ve gone Incognito Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google. Downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more" They edited that because of the lawsuit. Before the lawsuit what it said was: "Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won’t see your activity. However, downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more" I think it's understandable that someone would take "you can browse privately" to mean "We aren't tracking what you do"
    - magicalist 2y ago
      > Before the lawsuit what it said was That's incorrect, there's always been a list of entities that your behavior won't be hidden from, including "websites you visit" (worded in a couple of different ways). Just image search Chrome incognito and pick a year to append to it, looks like someone always has a tutorial with a screenshot (and someone linked the chrome announcement video with it in a comment above)
      - autoexec 2y ago
        I just provided the original text of the snippet that was quoted. you can see the difference for yourself: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24039883/google-incognito-mode-tracking-lawsuit-notice-change https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24039883/google-incognito...
        magicalist 2y ago
        > I just provided the original text of the snippet that was quoted. But not all of it. From that article: > However, the bullets beneath the incognito notice remain unchanged. These point out that browsing activity might still be visible to “Websites you visit,” “Your employer or school,” and “Your internet service provider. The new text is probably clearer but more or less just restates the bullet points and adds "including Google".
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    The fact that they had to add that disclaimer indicates that people were mislead by the more obvious interpretation of the word “incognito.”
- silisili 2y ago
  Agreed. Not a legal scholar so don't know how much that matters, if at all. Though I was still disappointed to find out it was being used. I use incognito quite often to search for something I think may be questionable. No I don't need it super secret locked from the police, but it's not something I necessarily want tied to my identity/interests/Google account in any form.
inetknght 2y ago
> It's never been misleading about what it is I would argue "incognito" is misleading when you're not actually incognito to the servers. You're still tracked by many numerous data points that defeat the concept of being incognito.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  Doesn't the incognito splash screen say exactly that? As far as I recall it was always pretty clear about not doing anything apart from not saving your browser history.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    It’s called incognito mode. Isn’t the icon a little spy or something? The fine-print might indicate otherwise, but I think it is obvious why non-technical people were confused.
    - caseyohara 2y ago
      I'm curious, what would you call it instead? Safari and Firefox call it "Private Browsing". I wonder if that's any better.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        Maybe the button could be something along the lines of “Keep website history.”
        KeplerBoy 2y ago
        More like "pause website history"
        bee_rider 2y ago
        It could be a toggle, which actually would probably be more representative of the significance. Having a whole “mode” makes it seem way bigger of a difference than it actually is.
peppertree 2y ago
"full self driving" vibes.
aeonik 2y ago
Google deserves the criticism it gets, but I'm also skeptical about this. That being said I also think "autopilot" is a perfectly fine name for Tesla's self driving feature.
- Narishma 2y ago
  Well, there's also an ongoing lawsuit against Tesla for that.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Autopilot is a better name, although IMO it is still pretty bad. * Airplane autopilot doesn’t totally handle every situation, for example it (historically at least) didn’t handle takeoff and landing. * There was a lot of optimism around self driving cars when it was named. There might’ve been room to believe even the misunderstood full self driving idea of autopilot could be attainable. “Incognito” just means a totally different thing from what incognito mode provides. The word has nothing to do with the feature, which is about not keeping a record for yourself of your own actions. Name it amnesia mode maybe. Blackout drunk mode.
Terr_ 2y ago
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.
- xvector 2y ago
  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.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    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.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
To the tech crowd that visits HN, it's obvious what Incognito did and didn't do. But imagine your non-technical family members. You know, the type that calls you up for tech support on a regular basis because "you know computers". Someone tells them "Hey, you should be using Incognito when doing adult activities" and then gets caught browsing adult sites on a work computer because they thought Incognito would make it invisible. This lawsuit isn't for you and me, it's for them. The question is, since WE know what it did, is it ethical (or even legal) for us to join the class action? Personally, even if it was legal, and even if someone convinced me it wasn't unethical, I wouldn't do it. I don't want to risk Google being like "You joined a lawsuit against us, so we don't want to do business with you. Say goodbye to your entire Google account. This locks you out of your phone? Too damn bad."
- 31337Logic 2y ago
  You make it sound like being free of Google is a bad thing. :-/
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Having your data unexpectedly lost to you (yet still being funneled into their AI) is never a good feeling.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  From the incognito mode landing page: > Your activity might still be visible to: > Your employer or school If they want to blame someone for being caught watching adult content at work, blame the person who told them "Hey, you should be using Incognito when doing adult activities"
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- bengoodger 2y ago
  Incognito clearly states how it works every time you start it, including what it doesn't protect against. If we're saying that developers can't clearly and obviously state how things work, and are instead bound by however people think they work based on not reading anything at all, we're in a lot of trouble. Though... can we at least then get rid of every intrusive TOS screen and cookie banner in existence? Because people click past all of those too without reading them.
Ukv 2y ago
I feel wording like "browse the web privately", the disguise icon, and the name of "incognito" could very easily suggest to a casual user that the purpose is hiding your identity from websites. There is now a disclaimer explicitly clarifying that's not the case, but not originally.
IAmGraydon 2y ago
What does the word “incognito” mean to you?
josefx 2y ago
Googles privacy policy once listed it as a way to manage the privacy impact of its services without going into detail what that actually meant. They reworded it around the time the lawsuit came up.

by chungy 2y ago

If I was presiding over this case, I'd throw it out. It's never been misleading about what it is: it doesn't save stuff to your hard disk. That says nothing about remote servers.

conductr 2y ago

Yes I tend to agree although the word "incognito" conveys something that it is not, so one could argue the very premise of it is misleading

chungy 2y ago
I suppose if you don't read. If you open an incognito tab you are greeted with this text: "You’ve gone Incognito Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google. Downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more"
- conductr 2y ago
  That's why I tend to agree. IANAL and while this seems pretty simple for me to understand, I'm not certain that laypeople wouldn't also expect full anonymity based on some other aspect of the service and I'm not sure if this has been stated so succinctly since back in 2016. I think there's an argument to be made and if so, the case shouldn't been just tossed out without allowing them to make it
- autoexec 2y ago
  > If you open an incognito tab you are greeted with this text: "You’ve gone Incognito Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google. Downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more" They edited that because of the lawsuit. Before the lawsuit what it said was: "Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won’t see your activity. However, downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more" I think it's understandable that someone would take "you can browse privately" to mean "We aren't tracking what you do"
  - magicalist 2y ago
    > Before the lawsuit what it said was That's incorrect, there's always been a list of entities that your behavior won't be hidden from, including "websites you visit" (worded in a couple of different ways). Just image search Chrome incognito and pick a year to append to it, looks like someone always has a tutorial with a screenshot (and someone linked the chrome announcement video with it in a comment above)
    - autoexec 2y ago
      I just provided the original text of the snippet that was quoted. you can see the difference for yourself: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24039883/google-incognito-mode-tracking-lawsuit-notice-change https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/16/24039883/google-incognito...
      - magicalist 2y ago
        > I just provided the original text of the snippet that was quoted. But not all of it. From that article: > However, the bullets beneath the incognito notice remain unchanged. These point out that browsing activity might still be visible to “Websites you visit,” “Your employer or school,” and “Your internet service provider. The new text is probably clearer but more or less just restates the bullet points and adds "including Google".
- bee_rider 2y ago
  The fact that they had to add that disclaimer indicates that people were mislead by the more obvious interpretation of the word “incognito.”
silisili 2y ago
Agreed. Not a legal scholar so don't know how much that matters, if at all. Though I was still disappointed to find out it was being used. I use incognito quite often to search for something I think may be questionable. No I don't need it super secret locked from the police, but it's not something I necessarily want tied to my identity/interests/Google account in any form.

inetknght 2y ago

> It's never been misleading about what it is I would argue "incognito" is misleading when you're not actually incognito to the servers. You're still tracked by many numerous data points that defeat the concept of being incognito.

KeplerBoy 2y ago
Doesn't the incognito splash screen say exactly that? As far as I recall it was always pretty clear about not doing anything apart from not saving your browser history.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  It’s called incognito mode. Isn’t the icon a little spy or something? The fine-print might indicate otherwise, but I think it is obvious why non-technical people were confused.
  - caseyohara 2y ago
    I'm curious, what would you call it instead? Safari and Firefox call it "Private Browsing". I wonder if that's any better.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Maybe the button could be something along the lines of “Keep website history.”
      - KeplerBoy 2y ago
        More like "pause website history"
        bee_rider 2y ago
        It could be a toggle, which actually would probably be more representative of the significance. Having a whole “mode” makes it seem way bigger of a difference than it actually is.

peppertree 2y ago

"full self driving" vibes.

aeonik 2y ago

Google deserves the criticism it gets, but I'm also skeptical about this. That being said I also think "autopilot" is a perfectly fine name for Tesla's self driving feature.

Narishma 2y ago
Well, there's also an ongoing lawsuit against Tesla for that.
bee_rider 2y ago
Autopilot is a better name, although IMO it is still pretty bad. * Airplane autopilot doesn’t totally handle every situation, for example it (historically at least) didn’t handle takeoff and landing. * There was a lot of optimism around self driving cars when it was named. There might’ve been room to believe even the misunderstood full self driving idea of autopilot could be attainable. “Incognito” just means a totally different thing from what incognito mode provides. The word has nothing to do with the feature, which is about not keeping a record for yourself of your own actions. Name it amnesia mode maybe. Blackout drunk mode.

Terr_ 2y ago

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.

xvector 2y ago
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.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  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.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago

To the tech crowd that visits HN, it's obvious what Incognito did and didn't do. But imagine your non-technical family members. You know, the type that calls you up for tech support on a regular basis because "you know computers". Someone tells them "Hey, you should be using Incognito when doing adult activities" and then gets caught browsing adult sites on a work computer because they thought Incognito would make it invisible. This lawsuit isn't for you and me, it's for them. The question is, since WE know what it did, is it ethical (or even legal) for us to join the class action? Personally, even if it was legal, and even if someone convinced me it wasn't unethical, I wouldn't do it. I don't want to risk Google being like "You joined a lawsuit against us, so we don't want to do business with you. Say goodbye to your entire Google account. This locks you out of your phone? Too damn bad."

31337Logic 2y ago
You make it sound like being free of Google is a bad thing. :-/
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Having your data unexpectedly lost to you (yet still being funneled into their AI) is never a good feeling.
Manuel_D 2y ago
From the incognito mode landing page: > Your activity might still be visible to: > Your employer or school If they want to blame someone for being caught watching adult content at work, blame the person who told them "Hey, you should be using Incognito when doing adult activities"
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bengoodger 2y ago
Incognito clearly states how it works every time you start it, including what it doesn't protect against. If we're saying that developers can't clearly and obviously state how things work, and are instead bound by however people think they work based on not reading anything at all, we're in a lot of trouble. Though... can we at least then get rid of every intrusive TOS screen and cookie banner in existence? Because people click past all of those too without reading them.

Ukv 2y ago

I feel wording like "browse the web privately", the disguise icon, and the name of "incognito" could very easily suggest to a casual user that the purpose is hiding your identity from websites. There is now a disclaimer explicitly clarifying that's not the case, but not originally.

IAmGraydon 2y ago

What does the word “incognito” mean to you?

josefx 2y ago

Googles privacy policy once listed it as a way to manage the privacy impact of its services without going into detail what that actually meant. They reworded it around the time the lawsuit came up.