

Chrome Incognito Tracking - XERQ
http://matt.xerq.net/chrome-incognito-tracking

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magicalist
Two misleading things from this post:

\- the default when you clear browsing data in Chrome is for just "the past
hour", not from "the beginning of time", as is selected in the screenshot in
the post (so only any cookies set in the last hour would have been cleared,
which would be equivalent to having used incognito mode for the last hour).

This is almost always what you want because a blank history is a dead giveaway
that someone was doing something "private" on that browser, and because your
wife (in the post's example) is now really annoyed with you because she
suddenly has no history url completion and she's been logged out of every site
she normally visits.

\- that incognito suggestion message only shows up the _second_ time you go to
clear data in relatively quick succession, not the first time. The target
audience isn't everyone, it's anyone apparently doing a repetitive task that
requires browser cache/cookies/history/something to be cleared. At that point
incognito mode is a perfect suggestion, as ephemerality is exactly what the
user is after.

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the_watcher
Interesting. It's a nice convergence of convenience for the user (incognito is
a huge win over remembering to clear history) and financial benefit to Google.
It also doesn't stop a dedicated ad-avoider from using Do Not Track or just
clearing their cookies regularly.

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dhoulb
Definitely true that the less people clear their cookies, the better it is for
Google.

But that seems like a nice side benefit. I bet the main reason they did this
is helping users avoid login screens. When you clear cookies, you obviously
have to login to EVERYTHING again. It's a minor annoyance to me and you, but
to regular users, hitting a login screen is like hitting a brick wall.

"Hmm, what was that password? Did I use my Gmail or Yahoo? Is it my password
with capital letters, or the one with 123 tacked on the end? Bah, I'll just
never use this site again."

Basically UX hell for most users, that's probably why they're really pushing
Incognito. It's definitely good for the web if people reset cookies less.

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bane
Incognito mode was never meant as an "out on the internet anonymous" mode, but
a local "don't leave evidence on this system" mode. I guess semantically
people want it to be the former, some kind of encrypted tor ip-spoof
anonymizer mode for the browser.

Be interesting if somebody forked it an produced a version that did just that.

~~~
joshschreuder
There's been talk of Firefox incorporating Tor for a while.

See here:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=901614](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=901614)

~~~
bane
There's this
[https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en)
which is pretty turn-key.

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hannibalhorn
Has this actually been verified? I don't see much in the way of evidence in
the article, and Google's support entry at
[https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?hl=en)
implies that you'd have to sign into your Google account for even Google to
know it was you.

~~~
ephemeralgomi
Read the article more carefully. He's saying that Google benefits from
incognito mode, since it causes your normal cookie store (which contains
cookies valuable to google) to persist longer than if you just habitually
wiped your history.

The title should probably be something different.

~~~
cheald
That's kind of a bass-ackwards way of looking at the feature. It's an effect,
sure, but ephemeral sessions are a tremendous boon to users (troubleshooting
issues remotely is SO MUCH EASIER when you can ensure users don't have some
weird state messing things up by having them up an ephemeral session), you'd
have to be obscenely cynical to think that this was the impetus behind
incognito.

~~~
ephemeralgomi
I think the_watcher's top-level comment is pretty spot-on here - it's a
feature that happens to be great for both parties.

