Google’s Employees Slight Company Over How ‘Incognito Mode’ Is Not So Secretive

Google Chrome’s ‘Incognito Mode’ has been a safety net for users everywhere to avoid being tracked by their internet activities. Unfortunately for the uninitiated, the company is currently facing a lawsuit suggesting that “private browsing” may not be so private.

At the heart of it, some of its workers are even joking about how misleading the function may be.

 
Court documents via Bloomberg reveal emails from an employee, Lorraine Twohill, to CEO Sundar Pichai mentioning it may be time to actually “make Incognito Mode truly private.”

In reality, Incognito Mode only removes the ability for others on the same device to view your activity online, and its primary function is to delete your browser history and cookies. However, it allegedly does not hide your IP address or stop Google and its advertising partners from tracking and extracting your data.

Twohill pointed out that the company has had to use a lot of hedging language to make Incognito Mode feel safe for users.

A quick look at the Chrome incognito window shows that Google does indicate how schools and employers might still be able to see what you are doing online. In spite of this, a study held in 2018 by the University of Chicago and the Leibniz University of Hanover revealed that 56% of people believed they were still surfing the web in complete secrecy.

The email wasn’t the only thing revealed in the court documents. Other disgruntled engineers within the company have also expressed dismay with how the feature is being handled. 
 
In 2018, one employee wrote in a chat that Google needed to “stop calling it Incognito and stop using a ‘Spy Guy’ icon” so as to limit confusion among users.
 
Someone else responded to the message with a link to a Wiki page dedicated to Guy Incognito from The Simpsons, who, sans his mustache, looks exactly like Homer Simpson. The employee also noted that Chrome’s own incognito mode worked about as well as Guy’s hilariously lousy disguise.

 
Google has rebutted the claims, saying that it clearly states the mode is not entirely private, and users have already agreed for their data to be tracked.
 
There is no date for the court case yet.
 
 
 
[via Futurism and Gizmodo, cover image via Google Chrome browser]