[aomobile]

I surf in private mode. A super simple solution for all your tracking protection needs people. It boggles my mind how this comes up again and again yet we have private browsing since when? The 90s? Don’t be lazy - that’s the real reason, isn’t it? Having to login again..

[piaste]

You do know that fingerprinting is a thing, right? Private browsing is designed to keep your local device clean of your tracks, not the wider web. At all.

Telling Facebook "hello, I am visiting baddragon.com from Mozilla Firefox 63.1 on Obscure Linux in Podunk, Saskatchewan, population 32" is barely an improvement over telling them "hello I am John Q. Smith and I am visiting baddragon.com".

And of course, private browsing is generally per-instance. Log in to your Google account in a private tab? All your other "private tabs" are also logged in to Google until you close the private browser.

[aomobile]

I use a generic iPhone without any mods

And yeah probably need to use windows not tabs on desktop. On iPhone each tab wouldn’t see that another is logged in though

(Otherwise yes good to be aware of fingerprinting I agree with you)

[llarsson]

No, we really did not have private browsing since the nineties. It's a new thing, for sure.

What we had in the nineties was that we could configure our browsers to ask for every single cookie that a site wanted to place on our computers. That got old really fast when internet advertising became a thing, and tracking cookies were all over the place.

[capableweb]

> No, we really did not have private browsing since the nineties. It's a new thing, for sure.

Indeed! Seems the first browser to implement some sort of incognito/private/separated profile (specifically to hide your tracks, not general like Firefox Profiles) was Safari around the release of Mac OS X Tiger (April 29, 2005).

[isoprophlex]

Yes, because of course private mode protects you from fingerprinting tech and other tracking infrastructure

/sarcasm

[jobigoud]

Chrome's incognito mode doesn't block Google Analytics.