I do know facts about there internal system. Internally, strict separation is taken very seriously and the logs are keyed by cookies with separate access and physical logs for different cookie spaces and no joining is done based on ip addresses and device signatures in these logs.

It would take a determined and malicious employee to subvert these controls and possibly require multiple employees to get by code reviews to do such.

That said, I can appreciate the skepticism an outsider might have about such claims.

But, I also disagree that Google is incentivized to do "privacy theater" as you call it. For one, many already assume the worst of Google and also such theater could open them up to major lawsuits.

One could make the case that a company like Apple has invested a lot more effort in "privacy theater".

Their probabilistic systems appear to use the ip address for anonymous targeting. For example, when you watch YouTube videos using normal browsing mode on one device, it is quite obvious that they influence the Google Ads on other devices in the same household.

That doesn't mean cookies or logs are joined, and the targeting is always anonymous, so it is less precise than when using the cookie ids.

Fear Uncertainty and Doubt springs eternal. People are desperate to believe in inherent badness and abuse.

Here are the facts https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/7440301 Yes they still record your activity under some faceless uuid when you browse incognito. No they don't tie it with your gmail unless you login to gmail. Yes, it doesn't matter, since lawyers and government can access everything Google has, and put the pieces together. Policy will likely change in the future to make your full history of both gmail and anonymous browsing activity freely available to the public too.

> Policy will likely change in the future to make your full history of both gmail and anonymous browsing activity freely available to the public too.

Eh? There is no chance of this. What leads you to this conclusion?

Of course it's going to happen. Read The New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt. He talks a lot about how all the information Google records about you is permanent, can never be deleted, and any generation of lawmakers can decide to do whatever they want with it. Upcoming generations are going to want as much data as possible to train AIs, especially as the GPUs needed to do that become more affordable. You know how historians are always talking about what famous dead people wrote in their diaries and personal letters? Don't think for a moment that future generations won't do this to you.

That is quite the slippery slope you paint there. There would need to be several steps before we even come close to getting there.

Is it possible? Sure. A lot of things are possible. Is it inevitable? Far from it.

If people in a hundred years want to read all my emails, I can assure them in advance that I won't raise any contemporaneous objections.

But that isn't quite the narrow framing you used.

Yup. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.