Google Chrome Incognito Mode Can Still Be Detected
Can this fight ever be won?<p>If you've been browsing the internet for more than 5 minutes you already have cookies from some of the major ad networks. Therefore if you do not have cookies from the major ad networks, you're either a brand-new device or an incognito browser. All that is left to do is get in bed with the ad network to ask them if they have good cookies for this session. As it so happens most of the companies trying to bust the incognito mode are already in that crowded bed.<p>The next loops in this spiral are: 1) an incognito mode that seeds good-looking ad cookies 2) ML models trying to distinguish synthetic/cloned/5-seconds-old cookies from genuine ones 3) matching ML models trying to out-fox the models from step 2, and so on.<p>The last fit of madness will be a hidden session in Chrome browsing the web on your behalf, building up a bogus profile for the ad networks, and the ad networks trying to figure out if the clicks in your fake session are sufficiently human-like.<p>And whoever wins in this war, the ad networks will end up collecting even more data than they do now.