Private browsing is useful. Almost everyone misunderstands what it does, and that is not their fault. It is called incognito. It shows a hat and dark glasses. Nothing about that suggests how small it really is.
Here is all of it. When you close a private window, your browser throws away the history, the cookies, the saved pages and anything you typed into a form. That is the whole feature. It is about what stays on the computer afterwards.
It is a setting on your computer, not a disguise.
Who can still see everything
| Who | Sees what | Does incognito help? |
|---|---|---|
| The websites you visit | Every page you open, and your location | No |
| Your internet company | Which sites you visited, and when | No |
| Your office or school network | The same, plus whatever else they log | No |
| The next person on this computer | Nothing from your session | Yes |
Three out of four are unchanged. If your worry is that a website will recognise you, or that your internet company will know what you read, private browsing does not help. Nothing inside the browser will, because your traffic still has to leave the machine.
What it is genuinely good for
- Signing in to a second account without being logged out of the first.
- Looking something up on a shared or borrowed computer without leaving it in the history.
- Seeing a website the way a stranger sees it, with no personal history attached. Useful for checking a price.
- Looking up a purchase, an illness or a job without ads following you around afterwards.
Two things that leak out anyway
Downloads are the first. A file you download in a private window is still a file on the computer. The entry disappears from the download list. The file stays in your downloads folder.
Bookmarks are the second. Anything you save is saved for good. That is on purpose, but it is easy to forget when the point was to leave no trace.
What to use instead, depending on your worry
- Worried about the next person on this computer? Private browsing is right. Also empty the downloads folder.
- Worried about the network? Private browsing does nothing. A VPN moves the problem to the VPN company, which helps only if you trust them more than your internet company.
- Worried about being followed between websites? Use a browser that blocks third-party cookies, and clean the tracking off links before you share them.
- Worried about one file giving something away? That is about the file, not the browser. No browsing mode helps.