Google fails to neutralize lawsuit that complains Chrome's incognito mode isn't very private at all

Netizens who say Google continued to track them around the web even when using Chrome's incognito mode can proceed with their privacy lawsuit against the internet giant, a judge has ruled. The decision by Judge Lucy Koh, based in a San Jose federal district court just down the road from Google HQ, once again sees the internet …

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous But

I made my Gmail account in 2006, never bothered actually looking at it till a couple of months ago. It literally shows everything including going to porn sites 14 years ago, the time URL search history “Rocco double anal gaping” etc how long I spent etc. After 15 years. It’s just nuts.

[Lorribot]

when the win finally comes.....

Does this mean that in 6 years time Chrome Incognito mode will mean the Chrome will block all adevertising and third party cokies and any kind of tracing? Will Google have to get out of the browser game eventually as it won't be worth them actually using it?

[doublelayer]

Re: when the win finally comes.....

Probably not. They'll likely try to buy off the people bringing the suit. If they succeed, that moves anything down a year at least. Let's assume either this one or another one wins against them. What will happen then is they will update the terms of service to include a bit of new legalese and continue as normal. Like what happened with GDPR. They're clearly collecting stuff and they're not in compliance, but the various data protection authorities aren't doing anything. Unless somebody actually brings out a big fine, they won't do anything. The fines from small or class-action lawsuits are not sufficient for the purpose because the lawsuits are always run by lawyers who want a payoff rather than to see change.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: when the win finally comes.....

Not even Google could afford to buy off all of the subsequent suits.

It'll be a lawyers feeding frenzy.

[Korev]

Re: when the win finally comes.....

You mean like what's in their "Legitimate Interest"?

[werdsmith]

Incognito is a browser mode that doesn’t cache any urls you used. That’s it.

It just saves the porn surfers the effort of clearing down their url history.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. The only people it protects you from are your wife and kids. Even your ISP can see your data like before just fine.

Though I think that Google at least probably does not put the data it collects in incognito mode in the same bucket as the rest of your data. I'm pretty sure I'd have seen very different ads otherwise.

[Korev]

>Even your ISP can see your data like before just fine

Your ISP will always see where you're browsing; in the age of https (almost) everywhere they'd have no way of knowing which browser you're using without decrypting the traffic though

[Yes Me]

What Chrome tells when you enter incognito mode

Note that it tells you what they won't do, not what they will do. I think the lawyers told them this was OK:

"Chrome won’t save the following information:

. Your browsing history

. Cookies and site data

. Information entered in forms

Your activity might still be visible to:

. Websites you visit

. Your employer or school

. Your internet service provider"

[Claptrap314]

If accurate

then it sounds like the judge does not understand what's going on. At all.

Google analytics is a domain serving javascript like any other. It has nothing to do with any particular browser. Any expectation that a browser's incognito mode would magically know about each and every of the hundreds of tracking domains and turn them all off...is magical thinking.

Unless Chrome is sending this data out itself, there is nothing here.

[eric-d]

This is crazy

No browsers incognito mode protects you from tracking on the web. Incognito mode literally doesn't block anything not blocked in normal browsing mode. You just start with your cache, history, cookies, and things like local and session storage empty. As you browse these things fill up with data because disabling them completely breaks almost all websites. Then when you close the browser it clears the data stored locally out. All of the websites and ads you visited still have their copy of the data and if you logged into any sites like Facebook almost all of the websites know it was you browsing.

All of the people who want to sue Microsoft (Edge), Apple (Safari), Mozilla (Firefox) will want to go before this incompetent judge who is ruling on technology with little understand if what things mean. If you use a browsers private browsing/ incognito mode and visit a site especially one of their sites they will track you even if it's the minimum of what site link brought you there and what you did on the site, and if you login to one of their services they might (probably / most likely) associate the collected tracking data with you.

Now that sites are routing ads and tracking through their servers blocking third party cookies does nothing.

See:

- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/straightforward-simple-server-side-tracking-guy-erez

- https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side

- https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/conversions-api/

- https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/tools/universal-event-tracking

It's not just the big names doing this

- https://www.linkedin.com/products/magicpixel-server-side-tagging/