Incognito mode was always just to hide your local browser history. Think Google would NOT track you?
Do you have Google maps? They know where you are at all times.
The Google Incognito tab in any browser clarifies that while it prevents your browsing history from being saved on your device, it does not make your browsing completely private.
Websites you visit, your employer (if on a work network), and your internet service provider (ISP) can still track your online activity.
Hell it even has a link that leads directly to the privacy policy
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/9845881?hl=en-GB
The only thing that shocks me is that no one ever reads it
This was silently changed it used not to have the disclaimer sentence
It’s Google. If you are shocked by this, you deserve to be tracked.
That’s called victim blaming.
But yeah. I really hope people stop using Google products. Google is evil.
To be fair it is in this case the victims is more at fault then not for misusing, misunderstanding and not reading the terms of service or explicate use case.
Like this would be like getting mad at your doctor for keeping notes over you and sharing them with other doctors. But not your random friends or strangers.
Incognito mode has said it’s always been local privacy only not that it doesn’t track or record you, nor prevents others from doing so.
It’s just turning off history basically.
Putting the burden on users is a very Google thing to do, my dude.
That’s simply not true. People can’t be expected to know what’s going on under the hood of services designed specifically to simplify things for non-technical users and conceal what’s under the hood.
No, not really. There are low bars; this isn’t one of them. This is not something I expect average people who aren’t into technology to anticipate. Nerds like me, yeah. But not the public. Though we’re getting to that point.
Things do the opposite of what their name says they do. We’ve been in 1984/F451 bizarro world for a while, now.
wtf was anyone expecting
You guys are still using Chrome?
I haven’t used Chrome in years. Brave and firefox, that’s my crowd.
same i use Librewolf nowadays
Brave is also Chromium.
Firefox is also a web browser.
Oh sorry, I thought we were making meaningless comparisons.
So even though Brave is made on a Google product, Google doesn’t get the data? Is that what you’re saying? Because Google is such an honest company, sure they have no interest in the data of other browser instances made with their platform. Right?
Yes. That is in fact what I’m saying. Brave has built in blockers for ads, trackers, and cookies. It has a built-in VPN. It has a built-in Tor browser. It’s default search engine is DDG instead of Google. Considering Firefox defaults to Google for searches, you’re likely giving more data to Google through Firefox than you would using Brave.
You clearly have no knowledge on how browser instances work. Just because Brave has built-in stuff like ad blockers doesn’t mean the Chromium platform isn’t Google anymore and Google has no more access to the data. No matter the extra features it has. Using Chromium means sharing data with Google.
Why would using Firefox share more data with Google than a Chromium browser, when Firefox is the only alternative to Chromium, made by a different company and not at all affiliated with Google?
I’m not supporting brave here, but do you have any evidence that the open source Chromium browser sends data to Google in any situation? The way I see it, Chromium is like android AOSP without Google apps, less functional but generally de-googled.
I can’t say I’ve reviewed every line of code in that huge project, but I’d be shocked if the rest of the open source community working on Chromium was willing to have tracking code in it or anything else which phones home to Google, even if the majority of the developers working on the open source project are Google engineers.
Ultimately, both Brave and Firefox are open source, so you can look through the code and verify for yourself whether either browser are doing something unethical.
This ungoogled-chromoim project is probably worth checking out, they maintain a patch set which explicitly removes the only things in chromium which send data to Google, which is pretty much just the web services for search bar autocomplete and DNS pre-fetching etc.
It does have that, but don’t for a minute think they actually control chromium. If Google wanted to they could make life very difficult for brave.
Currently brave still has support for manifest v2 but that will eventually be removed and the more brave diverges from the upstream the more work is required to keep it going.
Librewolf
Which is why i don’t use safebrowsing but rather a separate profile located (
--profileswitch) in XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.Next headline: Google promises to delete the Firefox private window data they keep about you
Firefox’s main funding was from Google being their default search engine. Which of course means anything searched in Google (via the URL field) is recorded to the external IP address logs. So unless you are going directly to the website or changed the search engine in Firefox, yes Google was recording said information (or at least compiling the numbers for data analytics) to use for advertising purposes.
Firefox’s main funding was
was ? I think it still is
changed the search engine in Firefox
Which… takes maximum 1min to do.
or default in any of the forks!
I use chrome once or twice a year, when I need to figure out if a website problem is my browser or the site.
Ironically, I use incognito for that.
Incognito was never about privacy. It’s about hiding your seach history from your parents or partner or whatever
and i’m pretty sure the browsers have been quite explicit about this for a long time now, but of course no one bothers to read “This won’t change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google.”
It’s as far as I remember literally always said it’s basically just turning off local history, and not for true privacy. The wording has changed over the years and frankly only become more explicated and clear about that fact.
This is a rare case of google NOT being the problem here. People are misusing a tool that has always been honest about itself.
For buying gifts, for example.
Or masturbating to pornography
Or buying pornography.
Or pornographic gifts.
hey before they do that, can i look through their files on me? theres some porn i havent been able to refind anywhere
There is a r/tipofmypenis for that
Maybe someone knows a Lemmy alternative
Wouldn’t that be amazing! I have single frames of good videos stuck in my head that I can never find again.
They are fully capable of extracting profile data from you even if you’re in incognito/private mode. And it doesn’t matter what browser you are using. My colleague was demonstrating techniques to do that with methods he personally figured out in one day in a hackathon in 2015.
Google has been actively researching and developing such techniques about as long as they have existed. I find it improbable that they would actually delete this data.
“He’s the one who knocks!”
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.
- Google Chrome
Man, even then it was clear what it was doing, are they supposed to list every single website you visit that might track you?
Ah, good find. I just assumed it would have been explicit about it from the start
Even before that change it’s explicit about it… The change literally did not change any part of the text that tells you who can and are going to track you. They basically went from “this isn’t real privacy” to screaming at your face cause apparently people can’t read and are idiots.
This is a case of users misusing a tool and not reading. At best you can argue that google should have assumed it’s users were stupid beyond measure from the start and had a tos so verbose that only someone missing a brain could misunderstand the point of the tool.
Yeah, one would have hoped that’d be the case - but apparently not.
I just remembered reading this a while back (start of last year, it seems?), and it honestly felt like a tacit admission of wrong-doing - so they’re likely going to be facing an uphill battle, or at least are expecting one.
If anyone thought that Incognito somehow protected their data from websites or services, then that’s their fault for jumping to that conclusion in the face of everything saying that’s not the case.
Also…
In lawsuits settlement
In meme sentence, words disappear.
That was actually their lawyer’s argument, that “incognito mode” being private was just something people assumed and ran with, not their fault.
I mean, they called it “Incognito”.
Incognito: having one’s true identity concealed
If it doesn’t conceal your identity, then that’s pretty clearly misleading. They’re not selling to experts, the users of this are laypeople. It’s like if you sold a “waterproof phone” and the packaging all made it look like it could withstand water, but then when it got wet it broke and you were like “people just assumed it was waterproof, it’s not our fault”.
Sure experts could tell, and enthusiasts would read the expert opinions on it, but that’s not something you should expect of laypeople considering how it is presented.It IS local incognito. By definition the name is accurate.
The wording on the warning both BEFORE AND AFTER the change says explicitly websites you visit, and anything external WILL still record and track you.
It said BEFORE AND AFTER that ONLY local things such as history omor cookies arnt saved.
It is 100% incognito. For the local browser. It warms BEFORE AND AFTER that it’s not real privacy.
They changed the wording basically from an assumption people will read the examples given on the SAME page as the warning. To having the examples built into the warning.
Basically they assumed their users could read. They were wrong, people can’t read. So they have to scream it now.
Well yeah, that’s the only possible argument that the lawyer could even have.
I don’t believe for a second that they are actually going to delete any data they stole from users.
The raw data might be purged but no one talks about the ML modal that google trained with that data.
Oops offshore backup mysteriously occurred.
Of course they will! First you make a copy, then you delete the copy. Contractual terms satisfied.
Incognito/Private Browsing came about when people were sharing computers more often. It doesn’t save history and cookies and whatnot on your device. It’s to prevent the next user from getting in to your bank account.
Google and whoever else will still know your IP and can use that to cross-reference whatever other data they have on you.
I use private, because I am a tab hoarder
