Incognito is only good for one reason: Not having those sites in the browsing history.
259As someone else put it, it's for making sure your wife doesn't get suspicious of the weird ads you're getting, and when she checks the browser history it's clean.
Meanwhile Google, your ISP, and the NSA all know you're looking at freaky old lady bondage porn.
77I know this isn’t the point of your comment, but seeing “making sure your wife doesn’t get suspicious” reminded me that some people actually hide such things from their partner.
I find it a pity that some feel the need to hide their browsing habits from their S.O.
I feel lucky to have married a person who loves knowing all the depraved stuff I enjoy so they can incorporate it into what we enjoy together.
Honesty and communication are the bedrock of any relationship. I understand not sharing everything with every friend or family member… but if you can’t be honest regarding what you like with the person you literally decided to partner with for the rest of your life with whom to have sex… then who else in the world can you truly be honest with?
18Except some sites seem to use your IP, so if you're both using the same WiFi, you're going to get ads for other party. And for anyone else who used the same WiFi, too
3Permanently Deleted
1
It's handy when you need to make sure that someone else can access a url ok without having to sign in to the website or anything. If you can immediately see the page in incognito mode without signing in, they'll have no problem
70I remember having to use an incognito browser for testing at work one time, and it felt very wrong to pull it up on my work laptop instead of the personal laptop.
6
It's good for using someone else's computer without having to worry about passwords being saved or making sure you logged out before leaving
44I use it to get around website article limits when they try to force me to sign up.
38Websites with actual web devs block and track usage with ip instead of cookies/cache, nothing a vpn can't stop tho. More reliable to is to the way back machine on archive.org. Can also use a browsers reader mode to get around it too sometimes.
23
And even then, those sites can easily be retrieved by someone committed to finding them
5And like the traffic at home through Adguard Home I see logs. More competent networks elsewhere will certainly be able to see what you're doing.
9back in the day (before chrome or incognito mode) I used to manually delete specific history items, individual cookies and temporary internet files one by one to leave no trace, while not making anything look suspicious, all so my nosy brother wouldn't stumble on any evidence and use it to mock me
5
I super don't care.
If someone in my household chooses to snoop on me, they have more to answer for to me than I to them.
1
"privately" "chrome" pick one
101I'd rather not.
-3Well they're mutually exclusive so good luck
16
I use incognito so I can search for the word pork sandwich without it autocompleting to a pornhub video of fem dom bdsm.
79I use incognito so I can search for some completely normal thing that I'm embarrassed I don't already know
53Ya got me pegged.
... Which incidentally I also use incognito for.
10ME.
9Spelling basic works like experience or similar
4
I think you've got when to use regular and incognito mixed up.
Everyone knows you should be using Firefox private mode to look up pork sandwiches.
28Yeah. Though also so I can not be treated like I regularly search stupid questions I have
12
ISP can’t see pages. They can see domains or IPS but that’s it.
69They can’t even reliably see domains when you use HTTPS, because some IP addresses serve many domains.
37That's not entirely true. It's only very recently that browsers have started using a new system called Encrypted Client Hello which hides the domain of the request. Prior to this all requests needed too have the Host field unencrypted so the receiving server knows which certified to respond with. I imagine there's still quite a few servers which don't support the new setup still.
28Most ISPs are also the default DNS resolver for a lot of people, so they see the domain you're requesting an IP for.
22They can still (mostly) sniff SNI for now which gives them a domain even when the IP isn't unique.
18Who cares about trying to MITM the HTTPS when chances are they're sending DNS requests to the ISPs DNS server on unencrypted UDP/53? Comcast is the only ISP doing large scale DNSSEC, and even then that's with their DNS, so they could still see what you're looking at.
I may not know what specific page you're looking at but I can sure as shit make some assumptions about all of the DNS lookups for FurAffinity.net or Missile-Gayboy.com. That's probably enough for marketing purposes.
7
It's worse than that:
44I use incognito so I can sign into multiple accounts on the same websites at once.
42Firefox containers is your friend. It's way better. I can sign into dozens of separate pages for different clients in a single browser window in different tabs if I want.
33FYI most browsers have built-in options for user profiles, so you can have that benefit without the second account on a given website being logged out every time you restart the browser.
incognito is still handy when you’re logging in to a website with a lesser-used second account, though.
15
Especially when you do this, considering a lot of privacy extensions are disabled by default in incognito mode (at least in FF), so there's less blocking of tracking elements.
(Also, unless you change your DNS provider or use a (proper) VPN, I believe your ISP sees everything no matter what, though I could be wrong about the latter.)
On the other hand, if this is a woosh situation & it's a joke, well, then, eh, I've seen funnier. ¯\_ (•_•) _/¯
25HTTPS sends the domain in plaintext with SNI. Has to work that way due to IPv4 address exhaustion.
5Sometimes having those privacy extensions make you a lot easier to fingerprint.
0Not if you randomize a few things, than your fingerprint keeps geeting unique but different each time !
1
Technically incorrect unless you use http for some weird reason. The ISP can see the domain only, and (afaiu) not even that if encrypted client hello is used. At least kinda: they still see the IP which is not always unique.
21Yes, this is why you should use DNS over TLS. My router signal to every DHCP client that it is the DNS resolver, and internally use DoT/dnssec to query IPs. It also intercepts every request on DNS port in case of some DNS are hard-coded on some devices.
7DNS over TLS won't save you thanks to SNI. As there is a huge shortage of IPV4 addresses, same IP addresses serve multiple hostnames, and to provide a working encryption, TLS handshake includes the requested hostname in plain text so that SNI can be used to determine which certificate should be used. That plaintext hostname is something your ISP can easily log.
Rule of thumb is, Https does not provide anonymity, only encryption.
3
But the IP can also sometimes be meaningless if there are proxies or vhosts used.
6
As soon as Chrome first launched incognito mode, it immediately felt like the "Alert Google to start tracking you" mode.
16start tracking you
As if they ever stopped..
17
Homer? Who is Homer?
13Oh, my God, this man is my exact double! That dog has a fluffy tail!
6Tehehehe here puff!
2
homer? i hardly know 'er
1
A simple spell, wish it was effective.
9NextDNS
5The simple solution if you don't want your history to be seen is to have one account per user on your computer.
5Threat model. Most people never need that protection, but anonymization in front of their ISP etc
6Doesn't solve the autocomplete issue when you're trying to show someone something. I also don't get ads for things I searched for while in a private window. And don't forget how useful it is when you're logging into some of your accounts when it's not your machine, or logging into two accounts at once.
2
Chrome + duckduckgo!
Yeah I'm not so naive to think it actually makes a difference.
-1Chrome is garbage spyware. Use Firefox.
18
