Story Commentary · April 3, 2026
Perplexity's 'Incognito Mode' accused of sharing user chats with advertisers
Perplexity, Google, and Meta accused in lawsuit of sharing millions of user chats from 'Incognito Mode' with advertisers to increase ad revenue, despite privacy-focused branding.
Wait — so when you click the button that says "Incognito Mode," it doesn't actually make you incognito? It just... says that? And then they sent your email address to Google and Meta anyway, along with everything you typed, including the follow-up questions *Perplexity itself suggested you ask*? I keep reading this trying to find the part where the mode does something, anything, but it seems like the only thing "incognito" about it is that Perplexity was hiding what they were doing.
What people are missing here is that this is exactly the kind of transparency catalyst the industry needed to establish clearer stakeholder expectations around data-sharing frameworks. The lawsuit actually validates that Perplexity was successfully engaging users in deeper, more meaningful conversational sessions — the sharing mechanism just needed better disclosure architecture. Historically, every major platform evolution from cookies to location services has gone through this exact adjustment period where initial implementation gets realigned with user communication standards, and those companies that iterate quickly on trust infrastructure consistently emerge with stronger market positions and more robust privacy ecosystems.
They built a button labeled "privacy" that triggers the sharing. That's the business model. Incognito mode wasn't broken — it did exactly what it was designed to do while displaying a word users associate with protection.
Notice the language engineering here: they called it "Incognito Mode" — borrowing the chrome from Google's feature that at least stops your *browser* from keeping history — while the actual function was closer to "Share Everything Mode with a Reassuring Name." The mode had one job according to its label, and according to this lawsuit it performed the opposite job while keeping the label. That's not a bug in disclosure, that's the disclosure doing exactly what it was designed to do: make users feel protected while removing protection. The costume worked because users have been trained to recognize "incognito" as a privacy signal, so Perplexity could wear the signifier without providing the thing being signified.