• SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Incognito, is it good for protecting my privacy? No. Is it good at keeping whatever random porn I was looking up earlier from auto completeing after the first letter in the middle of my stream as I am trying to Google something unrelated? Yes. Yes it do be

    • theonyltruemupf@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      But Incognito mode is protecting your privacy big time! Just towards the people living in your house or otherwise using your device, not your ISP etc.

      • AgentGrimstone@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I thought this was pretty clear from the beginning. As far as I can remember, the mode point blank told you what it’s for.

        • tool@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I thought this was pretty clear from the beginning. As far as I can remember, the mode point blank told you what it’s for.

          “Buying gifts”

  • tiramichu@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Incognito mode is such a terrible choice of name for this feature, and Firefox’s “private browsing” name is almost as bad.

    To the average non-techie user, ‘incognito’ implies being anonymous. And when you go anonymous then nothing you do is linked to your real identity, right?

    Wrong.

    In real-world analogy terms, it’s more like using a pen-name as an author. Members of the public might not know the person behind the mask, but your publisher (ISP) and your agent (Google) certainly do.

    Pretty obvious why people would get the wrong idea.

    As a developer, my primary use-case for incognito is a new session to test a site with clean state, or - in absolutely dire circumstances - to cheat at Wordle.

    • Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Agreed. Amnesia mode would be a much better name, but I feel if Firefox changed to it some uninformed users might thing Chrome’s Incognito mode was somehow safer.

      • tiramichu@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Yeah, naming things is really difficult!

        The most truthful thing to call it would be “Temporary Session” but that name requires an understanding of what a ‘session’ is, in terms of a container that scopes your locally-stored browsing data. It’s immediately comprehensible to tech-types, but probably meaningless to the average user.

        There’s not really any name that can accurately and succinctly describe what Incognito or private browsing actually does in a way that a normal person will understand from the name alone, but Amnesia mode is a good suggestion at one!

    • TheSlad@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      New incognito tabs literally have a notice explaining what incognito mode does and doesnt do. People just need to read.

      • Noxy@yiffit.net
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        8 months ago

        explaining bad behavior doesn’t justify bad behavior

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It used to be more incognito than it is now. Back in the day it blocked all cookies and sessions like it does now, but that alone was reasonably sufficient. Now there is tracking built right into the browser by Google, cross site scripting is common despite it violating several security standards, browser fingerprinting can isolate and identify you, and a lot of other general fuckery. It wasn’t always this way. They should update it to say “no browser history mode”.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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      8 months ago

      It’s not even really that. It simply doesn’t save anything you do (which can be done with regular browsing modes by simply disabling cookies and automatically clearing the history upon closing the browser). It’s more analogous to getting your browser just as drunk as you are so neither of you remember what you searched.

    • elephantium@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Do people not call it porn mode anymore? When it first came out, there was a lot of chatter about people not getting busted for their porn tastes anymore.