Technology

59589 readers

3024 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

389

The Incognito Mode Myth Has Fully Unraveled (www.wired.com)

submitted 7 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

80 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] neutron@thelemmy.club 54 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

It's both a generational shift and education issue.

I grew up remembering the early days of going online. The only pc at home was shared by family, so I knew early on that covering my tracks (erasing browser history) was important. When Chrome came out and incognito mode became a thing, I instinctively knew that it was just a shortcut for a separate browser profile that does not share the main profiles cookies and history, that it didn't store activities on the local device. I knew that internet providers could still know what I acceded, and so on.

I can't ask for the same kind of awareness for people that grew up with smartphones, proprietary walled gardens and apps with most of the complexities hidden beneath pretty UI.

It's even worse when it comes to the general population - this isn't the 90s where college students and tech minded people made up the internet users, this isn't the early 2000s where people still had to use a desktop PC to access the web, with its components more or less open to tinker.

[–] menemen@lemmy.world 9 points 7 months ago

Tbh, today was the first day I realized that people see privacy mode as something else then "privacy from other users on the same browser". But yeah, makes sense that people who learned about the internet on a smartphone see things differently.