Control – shift – N or find incognito mode in your settings
and you’re away – free to browse whatever fleshly delights the internet can
offer up, sure in the knowledge that your depraved (or otherwise) tastes won’t
be coming back to haunt you in the form of endless butt-plugs, vibrator and
‘enhancement’ asset advertising popping up on every other web page you visit. If
you use a shared computer and don’t want the other users to know what you get
up to then using incognito is the best way. But just don’t think that your
online activity is gone forever…
When you open an incognito window and browse, closing that
window erases that window’s data from the internet history files, meaning that
anyone who checks the computer’s history will not be able to see that site in
the list of all the sites visited. Usually the history files are set to delete
within thirty days anyway, so incognito mode merely saves you a few days –
which is sometimes quite necessary.
So, closing the web page means that your device’s browsing
history is cleared, protecting you from detection on the device used to access
the site, but the sites you’ve been to are not similarly cleared of your
digital footprints. For example – imagine that you use your mobile phone to send
a message to an ex-girlfriend. In the morning – or sometime later – you regret
the message and delete it from your phone. However, the message is still in
your ex-girlfriend’s phone, so there is no guarantee that traces of the message
won’t come back to haunt you in the future. This is also true of browsing in
incognito mode – there are traces of your visit on the servers you have
visited.
Quite apart from the sites you have visited, many people are
automatically signed into their Google account when they use the incognito
page. Google Activity saves records of all your online activity regardless of
whether an incognito tab was used or not.
Even if you have remembered to sign out of Google before
accessing he incognito tab, there are still traces of your activity elsewhere
on your hard drive - computer caches and temporary internet files need to be
cleared and overwritten before these traces are gone.