Technology

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.

I'm just using it to prevent my depraved, shameful porn searches from entering my browser's autocomplete corpus. Learned that one fairly early on.

Castaneda also noted that the company (Google) will now pay “zero” dollars as part of the settlement after earlier facing a $5 billion penalty.

I can that a win (for Google).

This result has so many loop holes it's incredible. You can't read a single sentence without exceptions, unknowns or generosity. Horrible, but Google probably can blackmail the world.

Use Firefox. Sure, a clean session of cookies isn't going to keep you anonymous, but at least you can do it while not being on Google's own browser and also have it collect information on you.

Pretty sure it's always been upfront with that it still tracks you? I always thought of it as a "don't store history and cookies locally" thing and nothing more. Maybe I read that disclaimer with more cynicism than most?

Do the chromium based browsers like Vivaldi report this information back to Google too?

Google should have to clearly communicate to users what they did. Only few will even read and know about this. Rarely anybody will care.

Misbehavior on such a scale should at least be communicated so users can make an informed decision on their continued trust.

The op link hit a paywall for me, this one is working:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240401221646/https://www.wired.com/story/google-chrome-incognito-mode-data-deletion-settlement/

the company will now pay “zero” dollars as part of the settlement after earlier facing a $5 billion penalty.

I guess they would call that a win