I agree completely. The split between public and private life is so natural that we sometimes forget how important it is. Sometimes people need to be able to experiment and access information privately so they can think it over without being judged. It leads more genuine expressions in public life, even in simple ways. Maybe I want to experiment with listening to all the worst pop music to see if there's something in there I like without my music player thinking I love all of it.

Absolutely. Or take for example my friend, who's a literary translator - she sometimes has to research online the most outlandish and obscure subjects, which have no bearing on her own interests...

> I'm getting sick of having to open incognito mode on Chrome unless I want Google Now to happily repeat whatever I was looking at later.

Isn't that what incognito mode is for? If don't want your searches in cards at all, you completely opt-out of the cards that are strictly based on your search history. Ctrl+Shift+N seems like a small, reasonable step to go off the record. What is the alternative?

Why are you complaining about having to wear a bag over your head whenever you go out to pick up your prescriptions or meet your mistress, citizen? It's a small, reasonable step to go off the record. What is the alternative?

I mean, if you wanted to be sure you wouldn't get caught with your mistress, you basically would have to wear a bag on your head, no? Or at least her meet her indoors. You certainly wouldn't complain about invasion of privacy when your wife's friend sees you with the mistress on a date.

Hyperbole much? You can still simply not log in to Chrome and/or Google Search. But if you want to be logged in by default, then you'll have to tell the browser when you occasionally don't, no?

Most people don't intend to log in to Google Search, as far as they're concerned they're logged in to their email account. This is why Google got in so much trouble in France and the EU over the past couple of years.

This. I don't use gmail, but I use youtube. And when you've logged into youtube, you've logged into your "Google Account". So you can't have youtube open in one tab, and not have your history from other (non-incognito) tabs logged (modulus some tweaking of various preferences that aren't obvious or intuitive).

There's no reason why they couldn't to the same thing Mozilla does: a) have a pretty clear account thing for "sync", b) have a pretty clear page for opt/in out on what to sync, c) Have working self-host sync solution, d) have an open source sync solution so you can easily see what's going on, and how things are encoded/stored.

Here's the thing - I want my history to be available and searchable to me, because I often want to go to a page I visited previously. However, I'd prefer if others couldn't read it and I wasn't showed ads based on that. At the moment, Firefox provides a good browser that doesn't profile me or share my history with "trusted third parties".