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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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The amount of words needed to fully explain this to tech illiterate idiots would be so many that those idiots would just argue they cannot be expected to read all of it. These people already do this with the terms + conditions documents they agree to.
Incognito mode did every single thing it said it did and behaved exactly as I expected from day one. Is there a single user here who actually was surprised by how it worked? Did anyone honestly think it was like Tor or something? Why? Where did anyone ever get that idea at all?
Expected incognito functionality sits in the gaping chasm between actual incognito functionality and TOR. When I'm being told I can go incognito - you know, sneaky, in disguise, I don't expect to have all of my activity broadcast back to those that say I'm incognito.
Of course, trusting current Google is foolish, but that doesn't make it less deceptive.
So do you feel the naming was inherently misleading which led you astray? Because incognito mode absolutely kept things 'sneaky' in terms of hiding the things I look up from other people who use the same computer. Which is specifically what Google said it would do and showed examples of in TV commercials. And it definitely did (and still does) that.
I'm also struggling to understand what you feel you 'trusted' Google on exactly. What did they tell you that you believed but, as it turns out, was not true?
To be clear, I was aware of the risk thanks to previous reports and my work in the cybersecurity space. I'm talking about the average user.
The name is deceptive, and explicitly calling out a list of parties that may see your traffic without naming themselves is deceptive.
It's akin to a guard saying beware doors 1 and 3 - there are dragons behind them. If you hear this from an authority that would know, you'd probably assume there's not a dragon behind door 2, or they would have said so.
The perception of "the man on the street" is a common legal standard that I'd argue Google has fallen short of here.
Aww man I thought I found one! Guess I'm back down to zero people.
No thoughts on the perception they seem to be crafting very deliberately?
So you're saying it's Google's fault you relied entirely on false assumptions based only on the single-word feature name and ignored the very short disclaimer that appears every time you use it?
I don't use Chrome because I don't trust Google. I assumed they were tracking users based on previous reports.
I'm saying that i think a reasonable person would expect that their incognito browsing traffic wouldn't be monitored and passed to Google. This reasonable person standard is the legal standard for advertising and marketing claims in my country and many others.
The disclaimer explicitly calls out that your activity might still be visible to sites, you visit, your employer or school, and your ISP - they notably say nothing about Google. That kind of thing is very misleading.
Where in that disclaimer (or otherwise) would I get the impression Google will track me?