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Everybody with basic reading abilities already knew that "incognito" is just "not saving stuff locally". Sites can track you regardlessly. With any browser.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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99.99999% of users don't know this... People who work in IT knows it and that's about it.
This is also why Google search is still popular too, people don't know about any alternatives and are afraid to use something else even. They don't even know why they may want to use something else. It's ridiculous.
Google search is still popular because it works the best for most people. Bing and the others pretty much suck.
I know I'll get downvoted but it's true. I try to use DDG where possible, and I'm not paying for Kagi. It's quite expensive and I'm not too sure I'd like it. Half the time DDG doesn't find something Google easily finds.
And yes I know Google is worse than it was like 3 years ago, but DDG results are way worse.
Fyi: this also depends on local factors and the kind of stuff your looking for.
In my experience ddg is awful which is strange cause its powered by bing results while Bing result are ok, on par with google for searching and finding websites/services
Startpage wich is deanonimized google works great on premise but its unusable If you want to find local services/stores or governments sites. (It makes total sense though, its the tradeoff of sharing location data). At some point the top result was a starbucks on the other side of the planet and i had actually provided the settings with my nationality and main language.
Google remains king when it comes to digital shopping, results list almost all the major local retailers for me. Bing seems to pick favorite more selectively.
In all seriously of late the tools ivebeen the most happy with are:
- wikipedia search
- wolfram alpha
- gpt-4 (with healthy skepticism)
I seem to be naturally moving away from search engines in favor of just a few bookmarked sites where the real content is. Most of the internet that i havent seen is either not my thing or feels dead
Right, yeah it does depend. In general though, DDG is just bad about half the time for me in general. Do you know if startpage has a !g kind of directive like DDG? I may have to give that one a shot if so.
Not sure, but if you use Firefox this functionality comes by default and is customizable.
you can add other search engines shortcuts trough add-ons https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/startpage-private-search/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
I just tried a search on startpage that gave me a lot of issues on DDG last night. Immediately found what I needed! Thanks!
When did you try DDG? I'm newer to it and have heard it get alot of grief but I've never had much issue.
Pretty much daily. On my phone it is my default search engine but it often doesn't work out for me.
I gave up with that plan on desktop and reverted back to google as default since it seems especially bad at finding software solutions, and I'm doing most of those searches for my job and side projects on my desktop.
Well I used the Kagi free trial and loved it, and now I'm a very happy subscriber. It's better than everything else, and it's not owned by shitty big tech as a bonus. :)
I need to give it a shot I suppose. Thanks for this response.
Yeah you get 200 free searches I think, enough to see if the results are better for you. You can also raise or lower or remove certain sites in the results so you can get rid of the sites you never want to see.
I love their listacles format too when searching for best movies or car reviews etc.
Yeah, but "not knowing" is not (entirely?) Google's fault.
I can imagine a reasonable user who doesn't look into it beyond the old warning text being aware that incognito's purpose is to not store browsing history and therefore assuming that somehow impacts Google's ability to know where you've been. Like, they might know it doesn't stop trackers but assume not having the history logged means it's not there for Google to take. Or speaking more generally, they could've taken it to mean "we won't track you, but we can't do anything about others doing so."
I wouldn't say it just relied on basic reading abilities, as you could easily be misled if your mental model for how tracking and data collection works was just a bit off.
If you assume Google doesn't track you in any context, you're not a reasonable user.
It's not unreasonable to be ignorant. Particularly about technology which most don't understand
No.
Yes, often misunderstood, you do the same with Cookie Autodelete or Site Bleacher extensions.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The change is being made as Google prepares to settle a class-action lawsuit that accuses the firm of privacy violations related to Chrome's Incognito mode.
This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google."
The stable and Canary warnings both say that your browsing activity might still be visible to "websites you visit," "your employer or school," or "your Internet service provider."
We asked Google when the warning will be added to Chrome's stable channel and whether the change is mandated by or related to the pending settlement of the privacy class-action suit.
Incognito mode in Chrome will continue to give people the choice to browse the Internet without their activity being saved to their browser or device."
On December 26, 2023, Google and the plaintiffs announced that they reached a settlement that they planned to present to the court for approval within 60 days.
The original article contains 545 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Honestly I thought it would send out a no tracking flag. I wouldn't be surprised if it is or will be illegal to ignore that flag in some jurisdictions.
Do-Not-Track requests is nothing but a header on GET. at best, it's useless, with exceptions from websites that already barely track you. at worst, it's another data point for fingerprinting your browser.
Ya so a good reason to include it in the next wave of legislation, if it wasn't already in one.
So, how much to buy a couple of lobbyists to get this ball rolling?
Ehh just sit back and wait for the EU to lead in privacy once more.
yeah that's fair
The Please don't track me Mr Google flag
google is olny ducktaped to a requirement in the privacy community because of YouTube pretty much nobody in the privacy community is using google or is even planning to use google but there's YouTube and mabye google forums