Employees reportedly cracked jokes about the feature’s inept, and potentially misleading privacy protections in recent years, with one marketing officer reportedly directly emailing CEO Sundar Pichai, basically begging him to make the product actually live up to its name according to recent court documents viewed by Bloomberg.The judge presiding over the lawsuit last week refused to let plaintiffs question Pichai in pre-trial proceedings despite the CEO’s connections in Google Chrome’s development and subsequent concerned emails regarding Incognito.Critics of Incognito, like the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit, and more recently Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argue Google’s branding and messaging around Incognito makes it appear much more privacy preserving than it actually is.“Incognito mode offers users a private browsing experience, and we’ve been clear about how it works and what it does whereas the plaintiffs in this case have purposely mischaracterized our statements.”Google, according to court documents viewed by Bloomberg, also argues it’s common knowledge that Incognito mode does not offer full invisibility on the web and says users consent each time they use the service.“Google offers a pretty decent, dumb way to protect your privacy but it’s not very sophisticated and misses a lot of ways trackers can still collect data and will break functionality on sites that don’t have to be broken if they would have taken a more targeted and sophisticated privacy-protecting approach,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff technologist Bennett Cyphers previously told Gizmodo."