Is The Private Or Incognito Mode Enough To Make Web Browsing Anonymous?

Private is a relative term. This becomes clear to you when discussing “private browsing” that supposedly keeps your browsing history hidden from people who use the same computer.

Although the private mode is known to shroud your activities to some extent, it isn’t guaranteed that none of your actions will be tracked. It’s not just be the people on your network, the government, ISP, and even hackers can track your actions.

What Does Private Browsing Mode Mean?

Before we get into the core details, let us start by defining private or incognito mode. This is a feature that appeared for the first time in Apple’s Safari browser in the year 2005. The rival browsers like Google and Mozilla followed suit soon. Within no time, it became a standard component for all web browsers.

Private browsing mode makes a browsing section that is kept secluded from the main one. Any website you visit in private mode is not recorded in the browsing history of your device and the cookie is not saved once you close the browser window.

It is worth noting that the tabs in private browsing do not have access to the cookies that you use in the main browsing session. For instance, consider that you are logging into Facebook in the main browsing session and then enter into incognito mode and open Facebook from there. You will have to log in again in the incognito window.

This explains why third-party sites find it more difficult to track your browsing activity while in incognito mode. You can also access multiple web accounts simultaneously.

Moreover, it becomes easier for you to get around the so-called “soft paywalls”, the websites on which you are asked to subscribe or login after being granted access to one or two pages.

Limitations Of Incognito Mode

Browsers offering private mode often try hard to emphasize that it isn’t perfect protection. The best that private browsing can do is to offer a very thin layer of privacy for those people who are working from their private home networks.

Browsing in incognito mode does not mean the admins of educational and corporate networks cannot keep tabs on your activity. Moreover, it also cannot block someone from spying on your browsing activity if you are making use of a public hotspot.

Private browsing is exclusively concerned with the mechanism in which browsing activity data is stored in your device. It has got nothing to do with the transmission of data across the network.

Furthermore, there are ways to defeat private browsing locally. In case your computer is infected with a malware that tracks DNS requests and network traffic, incognito mode is not going to be of help. It is also incapable of beating the fingerprinting techniques used by third parties to determine the distinctive features of your computer and hence track its activity across a network.

Fingerprinting is quite an interesting technique. However, it doesn’t get the level of attention as that of trojans and malware, despite its exceptional accuracy in pinpointing individuals. While you browse the internet, third-party sites can get information about your computer including its display resolution, time zone, plugins, the browser, the language used, and so on.

Is Online Privacy A Realistic Idea?

The actual meaning of electronic privacy and whether or not it is a realistic concept are topics to explore.

In simple terms, internet privacy means the ability to browse and communicate without any third-party sneaking in. As of now, we have several limitations to achieving this.

What about the operators of your network and your internet service provider? And the government? And there is also the ad tech industry that uses advanced tracking systems to launch precision-targeted advertisements. The fingerprinting technique we discussed earlier is an example of tracking systems used by the ad tech industry.

The internet is more like a panopticon. It is true that the VPN industry promises privacy if you are willing to invest in their products but there is no magical solution. True privacy is an illusion. The best you can ask for is something that is close to that superior standard. To get to that point, you will have to invest a significant amount of time and money and prepare yourself to experience degraded browsing experience.

Wish to block your network admin from seeing what you are up to? Well, for that you will need a VPN and make sure the VPN you choose does not keep logs. What about trackers? For those, you will require a plugin. Disabling javascript is one way to better safety. Of course many sites will not work correctly but you will be protected from the fingerprinting scripts.

These are extreme measures that not everyone can take. However, these measures will illustrate that internet privacy belongs to the grey region.