It’s no secret that Google makes a living by collecting our data to show contextual advertising. Users know and accept this, but there are cases where the terms of this collection are not very clear and can lead to misunderstandings. This is Chrome’s Incognito mode, which, as we said years ago, has very little incognito mode and really protects you from almost nothing (neither this nor other browsers). This has plagued Google in the past, but now it’s even more troubling.

Google employees complain. Staff members have been complaining for some time about confusing ‘Incognito mode’ terms that don’t clearly explain what this technology does for them. Google Marketing Director Lorraine Twohill wrote an email to the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, asking her to “make Incognito Mode really special.”

“Incognito Mode is not really private”. The message appeared as part of a lawsuit against Google for this issue. Twohill told his boss: “We are limited in our marketing power. [el Modo] It’s secret because it’s not really private, which requires a really fuzzy, almost more harmful secret language.”

pre-request. In June 2020, a lawsuit was launched that threatened Google with a $5,000 million fine, but in the process, the company managed to prevent Sundar Pichai’s possible disclosure. The messages that emerged as part of the process show how far the staff went to criticize and mock the feature.

internal criticsIn a chat in 2018, an employee shared a report showing that users don’t really understand how Incognito mode works, and that it doesn’t protect their privacy as they think. For this employee at Google, “We need to stop calling it incognito and using an icon with a spy on it.” Certainly the name and image this icon represents can be confusing and misleading about the scope of the feature.

‘The Unknown Man’Another employee responded by referring to the character ‘Guy Incognito’ (‘Incognito Type’) who appeared in the sixth episode of season 11 of The Simpsons. For him, such a ridiculous costume “accurately conveys the level of secrecy. [el Modo Incógnito]”.

Google warns but nobody reads. When you open a new window or tab in Incognito Mode in the Chrome browser, the Chrome browser changes the browser’s colors from gray to darker. It also displays a warning stating what this feature does and doesn’t do. In fact, in a special section there is a link “More information”, which clearly indicates that in this mode information is collected as in a normal browsing mode. Under the heading “What incognito mode doesn’t” explains, among other things, that the browser does not:

“Prevent websites you visit from serving ads based on your activity during an incognito session. When you close all incognito windows, websites cannot show you ads based on your activity during a closed session”.

Then what does Incognito Mode do?. As explained in the same help section, the idea of ​​Incognito Mode is to prevent our activity data from being saved on our device or an account that we are not logged into. Examples of why to use it are obvious: Buying a gift for a family member who bought the same device. To many, this is known as the browser’s ‘porn mode’ for obvious reasons, and a DuckDuckGo poll has already made it clear that this mode is used for ‘shameful searches’.

Google defends itself against possible lawsuit. A lawsuit filed by a consumer group in the US has reignited the debate, but the company denies it was a case of abuse. “Privacy controls have long been integrated into our services, and we encourage our teams to continually discuss or evaluate ideas to improve them,” said Google spokesperson José Castaneda.

Additionally, “Incognito Mode offers users a private browsing experience and we’ve been clear about how it works and what it does, while the plaintiffs in this case have deliberately misrepresented our statements.”