Web browser functions like those trace their roots back more than a decade, and the feature — first found in a top browser in 2005 — spread quickly as one copied another, made tweaks and minor improvements.
But privacy-promising labels can be treacherous. Simply put, going "incognito" is as effective in guarding online privacy as witchcraft is in warding off a common cold.
That's because private browsing is intended to wipe local traces of where you've been, what you've searched for, the contents of forms you've filled. It's meant to hide, and not always conclusively at that, your tracks from others with access to the personal computer. That's it.
At their most basic, these features promise that they won't record visited sites to the browsing history, save cookies that show you've been to and logged into sites, or remember credentials like passwords used during sessions. But your traipses through the web are still traceable by Internet providers – and the authorities who serve subpoenas to those entities – employers who control the company network and advertisers who follow your every footstep.
So much for privacy, eh?
But in the year and a half since Computerworld last visited incognito, most browsers have added additional, even more advanced privacy tools, generically known as "anti-trackers," which block all kinds of bite-sized chunks of code that advertisers and websites use to trace where people go on the web in attempts to compile digital dossiers and/or serve targeted advertisements.
Although incognito modes and anti-tracking features don't compose a true system, they're certainly complementary. If you're using the browser's privacy mode without its anti-tracking tools, you're drastically shorting your effort at remaining concealed. You might as well wig-wag your presence with a signal flag.
That was best illustrated this week when a proposed class-action lawsuit was filed in a California federal court seeking at least $5 billion from Google for allegedly tracking users' online behavior and movements – even when they browse in Chrome's Incognito mode. The suit claimed that Google tools, notably Google Analytics and Google Ad Manager, "are actually designed to automatically track users when they visit webpages – no matter what settings a user chooses. This is true even when a user browses in 'private browsing mode.'"
It was no coincidence that Google and its Chrome were targeted by the lawsuit. Although Chrome certainly dominates the browser space – its latest share was nearly 70% – it is also the browser with the least-developed anti-tracking protections, as you'll shortly see.
To get on the practical side, we've assembled instructions and insights to the incognito features – and anti-tracking tools – offered by the top four browsers: Google Chrome, Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari.
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