Google’s Incognito mode is increasingly becoming a subject of criticism by people, including its own workforce!
In one email sent to Pichai, Google marketing chief Lorraine Twohill reportedly warned that the current stance of the company amid the customers’ concerns might lead to a loss of credibility from the customers’ end.
“Make Incognito Mode truly private,” she wrote in the email. It’s worth noting that Twohill sent that email after multiple users filed a multi-billion-dollar class action privacy lawsuit against Google for allegedly tracking users while using Incognito.
To gather our concepts, Google Chrome’s ‘Incognito’ browsing conceals your search history from other people using your device but doesn’t keep it from Google or its advertising partners. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argues that the Incognito mode is “false, deceptive, and misleading.”
“Privacy controls have long been built into our services and we encourage our teams to constantly discuss or consider ideas to improve them,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo. “Incognito mode offers users a private browsing experience, and we’ve been clear about how it works and what it does whereas the plaintiffs, in this case, have purposely mischaracterized our statements.
“We need to stop calling it Incognito and stop using a Spy Guy icon,” one engineer said in a 2018 chat. The engineer reportedly cited publicly available research showing users didn’t really understand how the feature worked. Another employee flippantly responded by posting a wiki to the page for “Guy Incognito” from The Simpsons, who, other than a small mustache, looks identical to Homer Simpson. That low effort disguise, according to the employee, “accurately conveys the level of privacy it [Incognito] provides.”
56.3% of participants in a 2018 study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and the Leibniz University of Hanover, for instance, said they believed Incognito prevents Google from seeing their search history. It doesn’t, in reality.
“Google offers a pretty decent, dumb way to protect your privacy but it’s not very sophisticated and misses a lot of ways trackers can still collect data and will break functionality on sites that don’t have to be broken if they would have taken a more targeted and sophisticated privacy-protecting approach,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff technologist Bennett Cyphers previously told Gizmodo.
