Incognito is only good for one reason: Not having those sites in the browsing history.
As 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.
Yes but I trust the NSA to safeguard the integrity of the National Dick Pic Database. I can't say the same for my ISP.
The NDPD is a strategic resource and there is little doubt it is guarded jealously by the boys at Ft. Meade
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
I 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.
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
I use it to get around website article limits when they try to force me to sign up.
Websites 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.
I use incognito so I can search for the word pork sandwich without it autocompleting to a pornhub video of fem dom bdsm.
I use incognito so I can search for some completely normal thing that I'm embarrassed I don't already know
Ya got me pegged.
... Which incidentally I also use incognito for.
ME.
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.
Yeah. Though also so I can not be treated like I regularly search stupid questions I have
ISP can’t see pages. They can see domains or IPS but that’s it.
They can’t even reliably see domains when you use HTTPS, because some IP addresses serve many domains.
That'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.
Most ISPs are also the default DNS resolver for a lot of people, so they see the domain you're requesting an IP for.
They can still (mostly) sniff SNI for now which gives them a domain even when the IP isn't unique.
It's worse than that:
I use incognito so I can sign into multiple accounts on the same websites at once.
Firefox 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.
FYI 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.
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. ¯\_ (•_•) _/¯
This is only true if you set your browser that way. On firefox I have all extensions be able to work in incognito. I believe you can do this on chrome too but I don't use that.
This is why I said "by default".
I'm pretty sure the FF default is to ask whether you want any extension to work in private windows, too.
HTTPS sends the domain in plaintext with SNI. Has to work that way due to IPv4 address exhaustion.
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.
But the IP can also sometimes be meaningless if there are proxies or vhosts used.
Yes, 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.
As soon as Chrome first launched incognito mode, it immediately felt like the "Alert Google to start tracking you" mode.
start tracking you
As if they ever stopped..
A simple spell, wish it was effective.
The simple solution if you don't want your history to be seen is to have one account per user on your computer.
Threat model. Most people never need that protection, but anonymization in front of their ISP etc
