I feel like I'm the only one that remembers that incognito mode was only ever about keeping your browsing history private on the local machine, not anonymizing all your internet traffic.
It literally tells you that when you open an incognito tab.
People are just both tech illiterate and regular illiterate. And instead of taking responsibility, blame someone else.
Did it ever change to not being about keeping your browsing history private on the local machine?
In the ancient days, before the early 2000s there were no user and account management in webbrowsers at all. You started the browser and when you were done you closed it. If you wanted to hide your traces you could manually delete your history. Remember at that time this was on "the family computer". So your wife or mother used the same machine and could find your history.
This was the situation when incognito mode was introduced, if you used the internet at that time it was perfectly reasonable, and you knew what it meant.
It just happened that a generation grew up who didn't know how it worked and they assumed it's different.
I'm surprised that this surprised people to begin with. The "You've gone Incognito" screen is very clear about what does or does not happen.
Maybe it's a naming issue. Would "self destruct mode", or "guest session" have been better?
I always thought that incognito mode is just for porn browsing so it doesnt end up in the browser history.
People really think they go invisible with incognito?
Does the splash screen not still explicitly explain that it doesn't make you invisible, it just means your browsing history is clear??
That disclaimer was actually a result of the lawsuit. It didn’t always say that. Google was sued for intentionally misleading users, by tacitly encouraging their misheld beliefs that it made them invisible. Basically, Google wanted to track users. And Google knew that some users trusted incognito mode way too much. And instead of correcting that, they actively misled users into believing that incognito mode was more secure. Because if users believed they were invisible, Google could continue to track them when they thought they weren’t being watched.
They got sued for those misleading statements, and lost. And now the splash screen specifically says that Incognito Mode doesn’t make you invisible.
It's not going incognito from the browser and websites, it's going incognito from your computer and the other people who use it. Did people actually think incognito mode was some sort of vpn?
Yes, people are that stupid.
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