Incognito mode makes you anonymous
Incognito or private browsing mode prevents a browser from saving local history, cookies, and site data on the device used, but it does not hide browsing activity from internet service providers, employers, schools, or the websites visited themselves, making it far less anonymous than commonly assumed.
What we know
Private browsing modes, called Incognito in Google Chrome, Private Browsing in Firefox and Safari, and InPrivate in Microsoft Edge, are widely misunderstood as providing broad anonymity online. What these modes actually do, consistently across browsers, is prevent the browser from saving certain local data to the device after the private session ends, including browsing history, cookies, and site data, and they typically disable or limit browser extensions during the private session. This means that on a shared or public computer, someone using that same device afterward will not be able to see the previous user's browsing history in the browser itself, which is the primary legitimate use case these features were designed for.
What private browsing modes do not do is hide a user's activity from their internet service provider, which can still see which websites or IP addresses a device connects to regardless of browser mode, since this visibility occurs at the network level rather than within the browser. Similarly, an employer or school administering a work or school-issued device or network can typically still monitor or log browsing activity through network monitoring tools or device management software, entirely independent of whether the browser is in private mode, since this data collection also happens outside the browser's local storage that private mode affects.
Websites themselves also are not blinded by private browsing. A website a user visits can still see and log that visit, including the visitor's IP address, and can still use various tracking techniques beyond simple cookies, including browser fingerprinting, which identifies a device based on a combination of characteristics like screen resolution, installed fonts, and browser configuration, a technique that functions independently of whether cookies are being stored. Logging into an account, such as a Google or Facebook account, during a private browsing session also allows that service to associate the session with the logged-in identity just as it would in normal browsing mode, since login-based tracking does not depend on locally stored cookies persisting after the session ends.
Google itself became the subject of a class action lawsuit, settled in 2024 for an estimated 5 billion dollars according to court filings and reporting by Reuters, in which plaintiffs alleged that Google continued collecting data through Google Analytics and advertising tools embedded in websites even when users were browsing in Chrome's Incognito mode, a case that highlighted the gap between the feature's name and its actual scope of protection, prompting Google to update Incognito mode's onboarding screen language to more explicitly clarify its limitations.
Genuine anonymity online requires additional tools beyond private browsing mode, including a VPN or the Tor browser to mask IP address and location from websites and network observers, and careful avoidance of logging into personal accounts during a session intended to be anonymous. Private browsing mode remains useful for its actual intended purpose, preventing local storage of browsing history on a shared device, but users should not rely on it as a tool for hiding activity from their network provider, employer, or the websites they visit.
Common claims
- Incognito mode hides your browsing from your internet providerFalse. ISPs see all network traffic regardless of browser mode.
- Google cannot track you in incognito modeFalse. Google settled a $5 billion lawsuit in 2024 over tracking incognito users via embedded services.
- Incognito mode is useful for privacyPartially true. It prevents local history storage and keeps sessions separate, but offers no network anonymity.