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Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

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Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

#51
post #41
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of sites respect user privacy. I should know; I run dozens of them.

Define plenty. Are among those "plenty" the actual important pages that people want to use? Or some irrelevant pages here and there? And how do you know there are plenty? In fact, even if it is so, how can anyone verify that, even just about your sites? We can merely just trust you.

>the actual important pages that people want to use?

Where is this special list of important pages? Are the sites I want to use not important? Does your comment need to be so simultaneously defeatist and hostile?

Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about passing laws which forbid tracking users like this and levying steep, business-ending fines against the companies who don't step in line?

No problem. All your favourite online services are no longer free though, what a bummer. Will it be a lite, regular or premium Google maps subscription? How about Facebook Messenger?

You don’t need detailed tracking to run ads. Newspapers did it in the time before the internet.

What did occur, is that advertisers could not be sure of performance so placed more value on the prominence and reputation of the media source. National well reputed papers got the best deals, regardless of real world performance.

It will lead to tight localization again, as advertisers can’t rely on Google just selecting the right people to display ads to, but would have to seek specific sites to advertise on.

The world will be fine.

Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about passing laws which forbid tracking users like this and levying steep, business-ending fines against the companies who don't step in line?

No problem. All your favourite online services are no longer free though, what a bummer. Will it be a lite, regular or premium Google maps subscription? How about Facebook Messenger?

I use OSM and IRC, so that's fine by me!

Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

#54
post #11

I’m a bit surprised Chrome developers went the route of an in memory filesystem instead of trying to sandbox and clear real disk access. Silently using up to 120MB without realizing sounds pretty bad.

You can't allow for bytes to sit around on disk in case of crash. Maybe they could encrypt with a key kept in memory? That'd still allow detection of use though.

You could encrypt both the regular one and the incognito one, with the only difference being that you persist the key for the regular one.

Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

#56
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, Google starts crawling the web in incognito mode; punishes websites that hide content.

I understand the point of using a special user-agent to crawl webpages for indexing, but search engines should use a "regular" browser UA string (full JavaScript, etc. to simulate an actual browser) occasionally. From a different IP range too, of course. If the contents of the page are wildly different, penalise the site.

What about sites which display different content depending on origin?

Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about passing laws which forbid tracking users like this and levying steep, business-ending fines against the companies who don't step in line?

No problem. All your favourite online services are no longer free though, what a bummer. Will it be a lite, regular or premium Google maps subscription? How about Facebook Messenger?

I would absolutely pay for this but I don't even have the opportunity.

Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem. All your favourite online services are no longer free though, what a bummer. Will it be a lite, regular or premium Google maps subscription? How about Facebook Messenger?

You don’t need detailed tracking to run ads. Newspapers did it in the time before the internet. What did occur, is that advertisers could not be sure of performance so placed more value on the prominence and reputation of the media source. National well reputed papers got the best deals, regardless of real world performance. It will lead to tight localization again, as advertisers can’t rely on Google just selecting…

This it could have the side effect of killing independent journalism startups. Big media is already too entrenched. These big newspaper websites do already sell ads directly too - DoubleClick can serve both Adsense (usually as a backup) as well as their own inventory.

Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about passing laws which forbid tracking users like this and levying steep, business-ending fines against the companies who don't step in line?

No problem. All your favourite online services are no longer free though, what a bummer. Will it be a lite, regular or premium Google maps subscription? How about Facebook Messenger?

I stopped using both of these BECAUSE of the ad network, years ago. A lite / regular / premium option, that I could trust to not also sell to the ad network (just because you pay doesn’t mean your info isn’t being sold...), would be a most welcome upgrade. Bonus: my friends and family become protected from this ad network too, which nets even better privacy for me (since analytics can know a lot about you just from the people you associate with).

Re: Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected

#60
post #42

Workaround for now: 1. Open the profile menu. (This is the icon in the top right, just to the left of the three vertical dots.) 2. Click "Manage people", click "Add person" (lower right). 3. Type "Darned Newspapers!" and click "Add". 4. When you get blocked, copy URL, use the profile menu to navigate to open a new "Darned Newspapers!" window, paste URL. It's a real profile, so it should behave quite closely and shoul…

Alternatively you could use Firefox's Container Tabs.

This works especially well when combined with the Cookie auto-delete extension.
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