Technology

And your ISP can still see which domains you’re going to if you use them as your DNS.

Just so you know, because TLS SNI is not encrypted and not yet universally obfuscated (adoption of this is pretty slow and one of the largest CDN providers had to pause their rollout last I checked), not-even-barely-deep packet inspection can be used to track the sites you visit regardless of your DNS provider or wherever resolution is encrypted. Just do a packet dump and see.

Also, if a website isn't fronted by one of the most popular CDN providers in existence, it can be possible to infer the sites you're visiting based on their server IP addresses.

Although this just shifts where tracking can occur, a VPN is the only reliable way to maybe prevent your ISP from tracking the sites you visit, if this is your desire.

It also doesn’t preserve cookies after closing the window. I’m also curious what people expect that mode to do.

I remember interviews with the development team about it. As far as I know they were always clear what was happening on the back end.

Well you see, it's used by virtually everything. So get used to it. is all I imagine people saying, not my opinion.

I can bitch about chrome all day long... but none of that bitching will be about incognito mode as that was and continues to be an useful feature that did exactly what I expected it to do. Everything it said it did, it did.

Just because people made up their own imaginary ideas about what they think it does isn't really Google's fault. If people think snorkels allow them to scuba dive and then drown, I'm not about to blame the snorkel maker that wrote 'diving googles and snorkel' on the packaging.

I switched away from chrome a while ago, but this is just stupid. Incognito has always said that it can’t stop sties from tracking you. It’s always been about stopping stuff from being stored locally. Here’s the message:

If you read that and thought it did more than it said, that’s on you.

Incognito mode didn't do what it was never advertised to do, and in fact does precisely what it always claimed. The horror!

I swear people like you act like every day Google simply exists is a fresh outrage.

I don't believe it was ever called 'private mode', or am I wrong on this?

Guest sessions already exist in the profile menu and is a separate feature. Guest doesn't save history/cookies/etc locally but also doesn't use your existing history, extensions, bookmarks, settings, etc. It's intended more for an actual guest user to sign into temporarily.

“If you’re concerned, for whatever reason, you do not wish to be tracked by federal and state authorities, my strong recommendation is to use [Google Chrome’s] incognito mode.”

• Eric Schmidt, 2014

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/05/super-cookies-can-track-you-over-google-incognito/

If I had to guess, is because the mode's very name strongly tells you so?

Definition-- adjective (of a person) having one's true identity concealed. "in order to observe you have to be incognito"

adverb in a way that conceals one's true identity. "he is now operating incognito"

noun an assumed or false identity. "she is locked in her incognito"

not protecting users from tracking is very different than wantonly tracking users yourself when they literally hit the privacy button

I'd say give a try to Firefox

Unfortunately I have it installed to double-check things and occasional compatibility purpose. Believe it or not, sites have started to appear who work in Chrome but not Firefox. Solution is most likely perfectly simple but developers just don't want to deal with it so I've been told "just use Chrome" few times in past few years.

Firefox's InPrivate mode is the exact same feature.

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?