> The plaintiffs had asked for $5 billion in damages, but the settlement provided no monetary relief. Individuals will be allowed to file claims in state courts, and Boies Schiller lawyers have said they already filed more than 1,000 such cases in California state court, with plans to file many more.
But imagine your non-technical family members. You know, the type that calls you up for tech support on a regular basis because "you know computers". Someone tells them "Hey, you should be using Incognito when doing adult activities" and then gets caught browsing adult sites on a work computer because they thought Incognito would make it invisible.
This lawsuit isn't for you and me, it's for them.
The question is, since WE know what it did, is it ethical (or even legal) for us to join the class action?
Personally, even if it was legal, and even if someone convinced me it wasn't unethical, I wouldn't do it. I don't want to risk Google being like "You joined a lawsuit against us, so we don't want to do business with you. Say goodbye to your entire Google account. This locks you out of your phone? Too damn bad."
I understand how it works, everybody on this site does, as you note it is obvious to anybody who knows how the internet works. Zero points for meeting the minimum standard.
But, the name is “Incognito mode.” The icon is a little spy. If somebody doesn’t understand how this is misleading to non-technical people, they might have computer literacy, but they desperately lack human literacy.
If we're saying that developers can't clearly and obviously state how things work, and are instead bound by however people think they work based on not reading anything at all, we're in a lot of trouble.
Though... can we at least then get rid of every intrusive TOS screen and cookie banner in existence? Because people click past all of those too without reading them.
> Your activity might still be visible to:
> Your employer or school
If they want to blame someone for being caught watching adult content at work, blame the person who told them "Hey, you should be using Incognito when doing adult activities"
Another lawsuit for them then.
Customers wre using a tool provided by Google for accessing Google services (among others) and the Google tool is promising them that their activity isn't being recorded.
It isn't unreasonable for someone to believe that the promise included all those Google services and websites as well, but instead they were still being tracked and correlated etc.
This would mean one of two things: - Everyone could detect incognito mode, and many sites would refuse to work with it, defeating the purpose of it for many cases. - Only Google could detect incognito mode, which makes it still work with other sites, but is an obvious anti-trust risk.
I would argue "incognito" is misleading when you're not actually incognito to the servers. You're still tracked by many numerous data points that defeat the concept of being incognito.
As far as I recall it was always pretty clear about not doing anything apart from not saving your browser history.
Incognito is not a promise from everyone else in the world not to look at you and not try to figure out who you are.
And if you pull up in the same car everywhere, then it's quite easy for observers to give you a consistent ID tag even if you are changing your wig all the time.
That being said I also think "autopilot" is a perfectly fine name for Tesla's self driving feature.
* Airplane autopilot doesn’t totally handle every situation, for example it (historically at least) didn’t handle takeoff and landing.
* There was a lot of optimism around self driving cars when it was named. There might’ve been room to believe even the misunderstood full self driving idea of autopilot could be attainable.
“Incognito” just means a totally different thing from what incognito mode provides. The word has nothing to do with the feature, which is about not keeping a record for yourself of your own actions. Name it amnesia mode maybe. Blackout drunk mode.
"You’ve gone Incognito Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google. Downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more"
Though I was still disappointed to find out it was being used. I use incognito quite often to search for something I think may be questionable. No I don't need it super secret locked from the police, but it's not something I necessarily want tied to my identity/interests/Google account in any form.
> Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won't change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google. Downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more
> Chrome won’t save: * Your browsing history * Cookies and site data * Information entered in forms
> Your activity might still be visible to: * Websites you visit * Your employer or school * Your internet service provider
I just don't see how that warning could be much clearer, it's certainly written in a way that even a non-technical person can understand. Now whether users read warning messages is a different story...
You can see it in the original announcement here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d1_ool4r7s&t=1503s
But I sign up for class actions all the time. After all, other people will anyway so it's going to run. So it's a tax on all these corps and I'd like to get my money.
Through a different litigation I got $500 on Stubhub once. That's pretty good.
> Are You Eligible?
> -Used Google Incognito mode between June 1, 2016 - December 1, 2023
> -Expected browsing activity to remain private
> -Did not always consent to Google tracking
> -Age 18+
> -US Resident
If you are a resident somewhere else you should be able to file a lawsuit there.
There was a similar case with a well known speaker company, and the payouts for that were several hundred dollars, and there's another one that's ongoing for Steam/Valve along these same lines. The attorney's fees come out of a percentage of the individual award, which can be much higher in these cases.
> XVI. FIRM DOES NOT GUARANTEE RESULT
> I understand that there is always a risk to litigation. If I were to lose a case, under some circumstances, I may have to pay costs and/or attorney fees to the prevailing party. I acknowledge that FIRM has made no guarantee regarding the successful termination of my case and all expressions about the relative chances of success are matters of opinion only.
I know it sounds as Google has me kidnapped... which may be (and it could be my fault for not migrate to a different service, but the social part of migrating, not the technical part, is what worries me)
Maybe I'm just jaded & tech-savvy, but I figured way more people would have understood this.
The tech-savvy part is what matters.
Try asking a non-technical relative what they think Incognito does, if they even know that it even exists.
I can assure you that there are tech illiterate people who can read and think and have no problems understanding incognito mode. Then there are people who can't read or think (definitely not at the same time), which is highly correlated with being tech illiterate.
-Used Google Incognito mode between June 1, 2016 - December 1, 2023
-Expected browsing activity to remain private
-Did not always consent to Google tracking
-Age 18+
-US Resident"
lol
I'd argue that you lost the ability to install linux on your device. You may have never made the choice to install it, but the option was yours, Sony advertised that it was an option you'd have if you gave them your money and then they took that from you after they got your cash.
That said, I would agree that the people most harmed should be the most compensated.
