I’m confused about what Google/Chrome tracks in icognito mode
A lawsuit just ended with Google paying an incredible $5bn for "misleading users into thinking the company would not track them in incognito mode".
The article then goes to clarify:
Chrome, the browser, does not save your history when browsing in incognito mode. Google — the search engine, advertising giant, and trillion-dollar company — will still track your browsing activity per usual, even when in incognito mode.
And also:
"Others who use this device won't see your activity, so you can browse more privately," the new disclaimer reads. "This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google."
So... what? The way I've always understood Incognito mode (in all browsers, including Chrome) is that it gives you basically a clean slate and a separate sandbox when viewing websites. No cookies, local storage, session storage, etc. carry over from your regular browsing; and no cookies/local storage/etc are saved anywhere on your PC, and all disappear when the Incognito window is closed. Ideally I think they would all just be in RAM and never persisted to the hard drive, but that's a detail I don't know.
It also seems obvious to me that all the websites I'm visiting don't know that I'm using Incognito mode, and they can still see my IP address, and they can store new cookies etc. Thus I would expect that Google and anyone else can "track" me in Incognito mode, but the tracking ID would be different in Incognito mode. In other words, my actions done in Incognito mode would not be associated with the account I use when not in Incognito mode. And when I close the Incognito window, that data might still stay on the Google servers, but there would be no way to tie it back to me (except maybe the IP address, but that's not a definitive link).
Is this not what was happening? Is there still some tracking ID that stays unchanged in the Incognito mode which allows Google and/or other websites to associate my actions in Incognito mode with my actions outside of it? Or was the whole point of the lawsuit about people not quite understanding what "tracking" means and what Incognito mode does?
