Your browser has ad tech's fingerprints all over it, but there's a clean-up squad in town
There are few tech deceptions more successful than Chrome’s Incognito Mode.
Alongside its fellow travellers in other browsers offering Private Browsing and the like, the name and the impression is given that this is some sort of cloaking mode that shields us from the myriad privacy mosquitoes on the web, drinking the blood of data while infecting us with marketing malaria.
There is no such protection. That fedora-toting spy in the logo peering through binoculars is still looking at you and what you’re doing.
Incognito Mode deletes some local data when it’s done, but that’s it. It’s not even very good at that: if you think it vanishes your browsing history during a session, check out your system’s local DNS cache afterwards. What it doesn’t touch is everything that identifies you to interested parties while you’re out on maneuvers, like your IP address and your browser fingerprint. You’re about as incognito as a presidential motorcade, even if its itinerary is shredded after the event.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance