Hands-On Tech 281 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Hands-On Tech, it's time to settle the debate that, well, has been settled for many for quite a long time. It's time to talk about private browsing. Stay tuned. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech. I am Mikah Sargent, and today we are once again taking your tech questions And doing our diddly doggone best to answer them. Today's question comes in from Rosemary. And honestly, well, first of all, hi, Rosemary, you have a great name.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:37]:
Because of my co-host. Anyway, so with this question, once again, I think comes an answer for many people. This is perhaps another one of those videos that if you have a family member asking this question, you could send them. This answer. So let's take a look at Rosemary's question. Rosemary says, dear Mikah, my daughter informed me that incognito mode, quote, doesn't actually do anything and that everyone can still see what I browse. That can't be entirely true, can it? What does private browsing actually hide and from whom? And if it's not really private, what is it even for? And that's Rosemary from Lansing, Michigan. Rosemary, thank you for your question.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:25]:
Uh, I like to start out now with a short answer and then we'll go into the long answer. And it's a fair question. And frankly, your daughter is about half right. Okay. Because incognito mode does hide your browsing. It just does it from your own device. Not from the internet. What do I mean by that? I mean, it's hiding what you do from your own phone, but it is not hiding what you do from the internet.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:57]:
It's very confusing, right? So this is where I also loved being able to answer this question because I get to come up with a complicated metaphor. I don't think this one's that complicated though. You'll have to let me know. So Think about it like this. In your home, you have a whiteboard or a chalkboard or a corkboard that's got stuff on it, right? Private browsing wipes the whiteboard in your house, but those security cameras that you walk by outside, those are still out there. Those are still capturing things. It's not completely hiding your activity from the outside world. It's just happening inside your home.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:42]:
So it controls what's remembered here, but not what's seen out there. Okay? Now, what does it actually do? If it's not protecting you from the outside world, so to speak, what does it actually do? Well, if you're browsing in a private window, when you close that window, the browser goes ahead and throws away everything from that session. That can be history, so the sites that you've visited, it can be cookies, Technically also the sites that you visited. They save little bits of information about you so that they know where the last place was you were on the page. It helps to save login data. It's just little bits of data that kind of help to push you forward in the process. Also, form entries can be saved by your browser and logins so that the next person on the computer sees nothing. Okay? It's taking everything that you've done in that session and throwing it out because the idea there is that this is a private session between you and the device and that other people aren't going to use it.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:50]:
Very helpful in things like libraries or other public places where you might be using a browser. Not perhaps as necessary in a smartphone that is yours and yours alone, but still also an option to have if you need it. Now, it does start you with a clean slate in terms of cookies, and that can be helpful. Let's say something that comes up a lot for me. I'm logged into a Google account and it's a private Google account, and then I get a link from work and where I am, I end up pasting in the link or clicking the link, and then it goes to the wrong account and won't let me view the document. If I didn't have cookies, then I would be able to do that without needing to worry about what it knows about my previous logins. So it's really handy to sort of clean the slate when it comes time to say, look, don't remember anything that I've done before. I need this to be a completely fresh experience.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:56]:
It's super, super handy for being able to do that. The other option that you— or the other reason that this might come up, you know, say you're, uh, trying to save, save, uh, money for some, some gifts for people. Can you tell that was kind of a difficult one? You're trying to not save money, but rather spend money on gifts, and you want to make sure that the family computer doesn't show that you visited Amazon to get the gift, and they can see exactly what the gift is, and then they're not surprised. No, those private browsers let you kick out what happened there before, so Start fresh. Downloads and bookmarks typically do survive. That's partially because they end up getting saved separately or in a place that's more easily accessible. So that is something that may not be washed away, although different browsers do offer different functionality depending on what you're doing. So then you're wondering, okay, what does it mean in terms of who can still see what I'm doing? Well, your ISP can determine every site that you visit within certain bounds.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:07]:
Due to the nature of the modern web, how much of it is encrypted, it does make it less possible for a company like your ISP to be able to see exactly what you're doing, But it does tell the ISP that you are phoning the— because remember that IP addresses, we can sort of think of them like phone numbers. You are phoning out to these different websites, but what you're doing on those websites, it does not have access to if it's an encrypted connection, HTTPS. Your employers and your school, they may be able to see more information, depending, because if you're on their network or on one of their devices, incognito mode isn't going to stop that from being visible in many cases. The websites themselves, of course, will see your IP address, and they can use that to fingerprint your browser. The good thing is, of course, that your IP address is likely shared with other IP users in the area, so it's not as direct, but it is close to, and then anyone that you Like any site that you log into. So sign into Google or sign into Amazon or sign into Facebook. If you do that in a private window, you've still logged in. And so you have connected your name to that private session.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:33]:
And if you are curious to hear about or to read more about how this works, well, Google has a great guide, uh, browsing incognito mode that explains it. And then Firefox also has one for its private browsing. So we'll link those in the show notes. You can read more about how private browsing works. Now, this was a question that was answered in some ways a bit ago because of the realization that there was a gap between what people believed incognito mode to be and what wasn't. In 2024, Google settled a class action lawsuit that had to do with what people thought incognito mode was and what it actually was. And the company ended up agreeing to delete a bunch of records. So you may be going, well then, what do I do if I want to stop a browser from accessing my information? Or if I am trying to protect myself more? Well, it depends.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:39]:
A reputable VPN, we've talked lots about VPNs, hide activity from your ISP, but of course that does mean that you are then needing to— Pay. Trust the VPN. As I mentioned, HTTPS, it already encrypts what is on the site and encrypts much of what happens on that site. And then of course there are little extensions that have tracker blocking, there are browsers that offer tracker blocking, and all of those can cut down on some of that ad surveillance. So each of them plays its role in adding to your ability to become more incognito online. That said, no single tool is going to make you invisible. And I'm just telling you, if there's a service that says, you know, we'll make you completely invisible, they're probably selling you something. The bottom line here is that incognito is sort of a clean up after me system, and it's specific to a device.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:42]:
It's useful, of course, but I can understand, Rosemary, the confusion because I think it could have a better name. It wasn't designed to hide you from your ISP. It wasn't designed to hide you from your boss. It wasn't designed to hide you from the websites that you're actually visiting. It was originally designed to give you a way to wipe away the activity that you just did. So ultimately, to bring it full circle, You can tell your daughter she's right about the internet, but as far as the sort of glee perhaps that was had in saying, did you know incognito mode absolutely doesn't do anything? It does something. It helps, just not in the way you may have thought. Thank you, Rosemary, for writing in with your question.
Mikah Sargent [00:10:33]:
If you out there have questions for me, you can email me. hot@twit.tv is how you get in touch. And I look forward to answering your questions soon. Bye-bye. Bye.
