There are two types of privacy to consider: local privacy and online privacy. Going incognito doesn’t hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider, or the websites you visit.” Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be kept. “ Pages you view in incognito tabs won’t stick around in your browser’s history, cookie store, or search history after you’ve closed all of your incognito tabs. As Google’s description of incognito mode makes clear, this is not the case: A surprisingly high percentage of people mistakenly think that going incognito hides their activity from all prying eyes. Judging from a number of conversations I’ve had, this description is often ignored. When you open an incognito window in Chrome, the most popular browser choice, there is a description that explains the limits of what is protected from prying eyes. Since all of these do more or less the same thing, so I’ll just use Chrome’s “Incognito Mode” moniker as shorthand to refer to all of them. Modern browsers offer an increased privacy option that goes by a number of different names: Incognito Mode in Chrome, Private Browsing in Firefox and Opera, InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, and Private Window in Safari.
