Well yeah, that’s all it ever was. The lawsuit was because of misleading/deceptive statements made by Google, which led some (intentionally misinformed) users to believe that Incognito Mode was more private than reality.
Basically, the company knew some users believed Incognito Mode hid their browsing activity. Not just from their local machine (via no logged site history, clearing cookies, etc), but also by hiding it from prying eyes like Google. Some users genuinely believed Incognito Mode was basically some sort of combination of Tor, degoogling, VPN, tracker-blocker, etc… And Google actively encouraged this incorrect belief, because they could continue to siphon off users’ data when they thought they weren’t being watched. The active encouragement of incorrect beliefs is what the lawsuit was about, not the data collection.
Well yeah, that’s all it ever was. The lawsuit was because of misleading/deceptive statements made by Google, which led some (intentionally misinformed) users to believe that Incognito Mode was more private than reality.
Basically, the company knew some users believed Incognito Mode hid their browsing activity. Not just from their local machine (via no logged site history, clearing cookies, etc), but also by hiding it from prying eyes like Google. Some users genuinely believed Incognito Mode was basically some sort of combination of Tor, degoogling, VPN, tracker-blocker, etc… And Google actively encouraged this incorrect belief, because they could continue to siphon off users’ data when they thought they weren’t being watched. The active encouragement of incorrect beliefs is what the lawsuit was about, not the data collection.