> Why the hell would anyone assume that the software vendor who made the browser had no visibility into the use of the browser?

Why the hell wouldn't anyone? I mean, expectations of privacy have eroded, but "you used this company's product, so you must be giving them permission to see everything you do with it" is an argument that, despite many companies' attempts to push it as just common sense, doesn't and shouldn't fly.

It really is the status quo now. It's in fact surprising when online software doesn't collect telemetry. It's increasingly surprising when offline software on an Internet-connected device doesn't collect telemetry.

VSCode collects telemetry these days.

> It really is the status quo now. It's in fact surprising when online software doesn't collect telemetry. It's increasingly surprising when offline software on an Internet-connected device doesn't collect telemetry.

I completely agree that it is the status quo, but it shouldn't be. It's unreasonably for people to be surprised by violations of privacy, but I don't think that it's unreasonable for people to expect respect for their privacy.

What "respecting people's privacy" means is very unclear and varies widely from person to person (the best quote I've heard on the topic is something to the effect of "People claim they value their privacy but then they'll give their information to a clipboard-holder in a mall for a Snickers bar... In fact, usually they don't even offer the Snickers.").

In that context, companies do their best to guess what their users want and ask for explicit consent when they can't. In Google's case, once we actually dig down and unravel the complaint that was filed by the Texas AG (https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima..., page 55-ish), the claim is Incognito mode doesn't stop targeted advertising based on browsing behavior because the fact that browsing occurred is known by the servers. Well, duh. Of course servers have a history of access to them; expecting them to not is like expecting Amazon to not have a list of people that ordered from it (how are they supposed to ship you what you ordered if they don't know that?).

And in the cases where people have gotten retargeted ads because they went incognito and then logged into Google... how the heck do they figure they're in any sensible way "incognito" when their name and face are at the top of the page they're viewing?

Because they accepted terms of service that explicitly stated what information can be collected.

That's actually one of the points of the lawsuit: the TOS is unclear and improperly vague.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't expect/want Microsoft to have a copy of everything I've ever typed into a Word document or Excel spreadsheet.

I'm now honestly curious whether Word and Excel still do spell check locally or have delegated to a cloud service.

Cloud Word and Cloud Excel obviously do, but "online services are online" had better not be surprising.