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The Incognito Mode Myth Has Fully Unraveled (www.wired.com)

submitted 5 months ago by jeffw to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

It's both a generational shift and education issue.

I grew up remembering the early days of going online. The only pc at home was shared by family, so I knew early on that covering my tracks (erasing browser history) was important. When Chrome came out and incognito mode became a thing, I instinctively knew that it was just a shortcut for a separate browser profile that does not share the main profiles cookies and history, that it didn't store activities on the local device. I knew that internet providers could still know what I acceded, and so on.

I can't ask for the same kind of awareness for people that grew up with smartphones, proprietary walled gardens and apps with most of the complexities hidden beneath pretty UI.

It's even worse when it comes to the general population - this isn't the 90s where college students and tech minded people made up the internet users, this isn't the early 2000s where people still had to use a desktop PC to access the web, with its components more or less open to tinker.

[–] menemen 9 points 5 months ago

Tbh, today was the first day I realized that people see privacy mode as something else then "privacy from other users on the same browser". But yeah, makes sense that people who learned about the internet on a smartphone see things differently.