If someone travels incognito they are allowed to think they are not recognized, right? No, wrong. At least, This is not the case on the Internet: The anonymous, private, or incognito browsing modes of every browser on the market does anything but make browsing truly anonymous. At least, in the sense we commonly give to this word.
So much so that Alphabet, the giant that in addition to the search engine Google and a thousand other activities (including Android) also has the most popular browser in the world, namely Chrome, was found guilty in a 2020 class action of tracking the activities of millions of people when they used Chrome in Incognito mode and will have to erase billions of data on the activities of its users for violation of privacy.
Since all the main browsers for browsing both on computers and smartphones, i.e. Chrome, Safari (from Apple), Edge (by Microsoft), Firefox (by the Mozilla Foundation) and various others (from Opera to Brave) have their respective private modes, which they call by different names and often have different trigger modes, it is worth understanding what anonymous browsing really means and what it doesn’t.
Privacy
Browsing (not so much) incognito, Google reaches a settlement on the 5 billion dollar lawsuit
by Emanuele Capone
What does anonymous browsing mean
When we open a window of our favorite browser in Incognito, private or anonymous modewe essentially start a navigation that leaves no traces but only limited to our device.
First of all, the navigation history or history is not saved: they are not recorded on our computer or phone the addresses visited to be reopened at a later time. The reason they are usually saved is to allow us to reopen them without having to save them as bookmarks or with browser history recovery mode. In anonymous mode there is no risk that, starting to type the address of a site, the one visited anonymously comes up.
Furthermore, Any cookies are not saved of that site, which could leave a local trace that is found by the site to which we connected previously in the case of a second connection. Again with this logic, the site cannot save even a copy of its data in the cache of our browser, and for example the data inserted in a form, or images or other data, at the time of closing the window are irretrievably lost. For example, if you save them locally, you will lose posts that have not yet been published on WordPress, or tweets on Twitter, or posts on Facebook.
In the end, no other information is saved, for example for the session: if you have connected to a cloud service by logging in, the connection is interrupted and the data to reopen it automatically is not saved. This is actually very useful if we connect to a home banking site or other services from a computer that is not ours.
And then, you have to take into account that the anonymous mode also disable extensions of the browser, such as those used to counteract forms of tracking or block advertisements. This paradoxically makes your browsing in anonymous mode more visible.
What anonymous browsing doesn’t mean
Browsing anonymously or privately applies above all to the device from which you connect to the Network. Nothing is saved locally here. Instead, everything else remains absolutely visible.
Starting from the connection provider, the provider, who sees all the traffic in plain text that passes through the connection and sees the sites we are connecting to. Warning: it does not see the content if the connection is encrypted (https type), but it sees and records all our destinations, which remain public. Then, since the anonymous connection it doesn’t happen through a VPNin reality the IP address from which you connect is also visible.
The IP address from which we connect is assigned by our provider, who keeps a record in which it associates our data in your possession to the connection at the time it occurs. This essentially turns the IP address into a kind of return address written on the back of each connection we open from the browser.
It must be said that, with Incognito mode engaged, however, the activity we do remains completely visible. Therefore it can be traced, obviously starting from the services to which we are registered: even if the session is not retained locally after closing the browser, everything is recorded remotely. If we log in to Facebook or Google and we look for a pair of new shoes, then we will receive countless advertisements for footwear of all types.
Again: most sites will be able to cross our activity (which page we come from, what we did on the site and so on) with our IP address and the characteristics of the device from which we connect (model, browser type and version) creating an identikit which in jargon is called digital fingerprint and is more than enough to recognize us when we connect again but in non-private mode and therefore continue tracking outside of the anonymous session.
Finally, anonymous or incognito browsing does not protect in any way from malware, viruses, phishing or other activities that are dangerous for us. Even connecting to illegal sites (for example to download copyrighted material or to watch streaming matches) is completely unprotected.
Internet
Who is behind Arc, the browser that everyone likes and challenges Chrome and Safari
by Emanuele Capone
So what is anonymous browsing for?
The choice of terms is misleading (and in fact Google pays the consequences) but in reality anonymous browsing is anything but anonymous. It serves to hide our local browsing history, preventing anyone with access to the device from seeing where we have been, and prevents unwanted permanent cookies from being saved on your computer.
Additionally, anonymous browsing not only eliminates some more intrusive forms of tracking, but it also allows you to have virgin experiences on certain sites. For example, to find cheaper ticket prices without having session cookies make the company understand that perhaps we have already found a certain price and are looking for better. Finally, given that the anonymous mode deactivates extensions (often designed to increase the privacy of navigation to the detriment of the experience of the site being visited), this navigation is used to be able to temporarily see how a site actually works without forever paying the consequences in terms of tracking and invasive advertising.
In short: as we understand and as we have seen, anonymous and incognito on the Internet they want to say something different from what we are used to in the normal world.
#incognito #anonymous #browsing
– 2024-04-06 15:29:56
