This is a pretty vague warning. What part of your "personal configuration and history" becomes available to websites in Incognito mode? Where did you learn this?
"""Others who use this device won’t see your activity."""
Seems like plain language to me. Anyone who thought this feature was hiding them from the websites they were visiting simply imagined that.
"Personal configuration and activity": where in the HTTP request or JavaScript API is that? What data are we talking about?
IP address, obviously, but that's not news. Or is this about browser fingerprinting?
Personal configuration: for example a website can query whether a user prefers dark mode or light mode. Incognito browsing doesn't attempt to hide that. Or consider that you have a fairly unique browser window size accessible using window.{inner,outer}{Width,Height}. Incognito also doesn't hide it from websites.
None of this is inherently newsworthy. It's only newsworthy because people misunderstood Incognito and filed a lawsuit. I'd say that people seemed to have mixed up the privacy offered by the Tor browser and the privacy offered by Incognito at some point.
You say you offer an incognito mode. Google says it's clear to everyone that they and everyone else it's okay to and normal to track you through it.
Everyone else goes "that's not reasonable at all".
This is basically Google saying "Well, it was a good run while it lasted."
They will do all the same tracking they always do, because they neither know or care what mode your browser’s in.
Maybe you have a pony in this rodeo you don't want to change. That's fair. However, I held the entire rodeo in the first place was illegitimate. User tracking/cross-site data harvesting/tracking pixels should all have been legally strangled before an absurd number of people were unjustifiabpy enriched by selling something they had no business collecting in the first place.
There are a non-trivial number of like-minded individuals who feel the same in both our cases, and by settling,.Google handily mooted the question for now.
By settling, they've left the legal question of what a "reasonable person" should expect here open. If someone else wants to sue later over this term or some related term maybe having a different layperson meaning, they can but they're back to square one: new case, new facts, no precedent.
Had Google dragged this out, and the Court concluded that a "reasonable person" believed "incognito" meant something other than what every tech-head has understood it to mean for the past sixteen years... The industry would have been in for a world of hurt.
Increasingly, the world assumes that all three of the above are true for everyone, and anyone else gets marginalized.
Smart people I’ve spoken to have no idea about browser finger printing!