Google engineers made fun of Incognito Mode for not being really Incognito.

 An unpleasant lawsuit, filed in May, accuses the Silicon Valley behemoth of misleading the public about how much data it gathers from customers, even when they are using the "Incognito" private browsing mode of its Chrome browser. And although those accusations are troubling, one of the more troubling revelations from the complaint is the Google staff's perhaps incriminating jokes on the subject.

However, a very serious email written to CEO Sundar Pichai by Google marketing executive Lorraine Twohill was also made public in court.

As stated by Bloomberg, Twohill urged developers to "make Incognito Mode genuinely private" in the email from last year. Because Incognito isn't genuinely private, we are constrained in how aggressively we can advertise it, necessitating extremely ambiguous, hedging language that is nearly more harmful.

The email was disclosed in court records from the ongoing trial, along with many additional correspondence. Numerous of these demonstrate how Google's engineers believed the company's public stance on Incognito mode was dubious and inaccurate.

One Chrome engineer told coworkers in a 2018 group chat that "we need to stop calling it Incognito and stop using a Spy Guy icon," referring to Incognito mode's quirky icon that shows the silhouette of a cartoon spy wearing sunglasses and a fedora. The engineer shared a study that showed users misunderstood Incognito mode's limited privacy.

Another programmer replied by pointing to a wiki page for Guy Incognito, a character from "The Simpsons" who resembles Homer Simpson if he were wearing a hideous disguise.

Whatever the name, the Incognito symbol should have always been [Guy Incognito], which also appropriately communicates the amount of anonymity it offers, the employee concluded.

Overall, awful. That gives us a fairly scathing — and hilarious — look at how little Google's own staff members valued browsing mode privacy.

In its defense, Google claims that it makes it plain to users that Incognito mode isn't completely private and that users have previously given their agreement for the corporation to follow their data. The trial has not yet been scheduled, but it may reveal what kinds of Incognito data Google is holding on to. It will be exciting to see how it all turns out.