[patrickscoleman]

their "private" is not private. about a month ago, i searched for some health-related stuff in a chrome incognito window and then immediately afterwards got related sponsored product ads on amazon in a logged in normal window.

[naniwaduni]

"Private" and "incognito" mode are fundamentally misnamed. They provide almost no real privacy wrt counterparties over the network, just to other people using the same computer after you.

Amnesiac mode, if you will.

[lucb1e]

I remember upon introduction, tech news would jokingly refer to it as the porn button if they were immature enough (and let's face it, back then most of us and the web news sites were quite literally immature). Sounds like that would be more accurate, but it fell out of style and now we have this name :(

[samtheprogram]

This is not true of any web browser because of fingerprinting. That’s the point of fingerprinting for ad networks.

You can try using a different device but even then, I occasionally get recommending things that are definitely influenced by my roommates (i.e. on the same WiFi)

Using something that prevents fingerprinting helps, but only if you don’t use that browser all the time — otherwise it’s just another fingerprint — and still on the same network.

[kennywinker]

> This is not true of any web browser because of fingerprinting.

Some browsers, like the one you should be using, have anti-fingerprinting tech in them.

[jeroenhd]

Anti fingerprinting is nice but if you get served ads based on your IP address you're going to need more than just a browser to escape tracking based advertising. Adblockers aren't good enough when websites you visit use first-party servers to forward data back to ad networks.

[jazzypants]

Serving ads based on IP seems foolish when very, very few people have a static IP. I'm sure that a healthy minority of folks on HN do, but we're hardly representative of the general population.

[pixl97]

Your IP is a lot more static than you give it credit for. It's not like the dialup era where you get a new IP each time. For example I have a dynamic IP on my cable modem, but it might as well be static as it only changes after there is a long term power outage. Also, it's likely if you're on a home connection most often, then you only have a limited pool of 32k or so IPs, which dramatically lowers the bits of information needed to identify you.

[immibis]

European ISPs (at least some) change your IP every day, including IPv6, unless you opt out from the router's configuration page, as a privacy feature.

Apparently tracking data of Europeans has a much higher market price.

[akimbostrawman]

Mullvad Browser comes with the fingerprint protection of the tor browser and a VPN addon but you do need to pay for there vpn.

[samtheprogram]

You didn’t finish my comment. Read the last sentence.

Anti-fingerprinting tech just produces a different fingerprint. Google knows e.g. when things are scrambled but certain other things stay the same.

[tojumpship]

Untrue, you can modify it enough to avoid giving it more entropy. Possible approaches include: - Spoofing browsers down to the TCP stack - Plausibily random values - Every possible bit scrambled on each request

You can see a similar thought-process behind Tor bridges so it is tried-and-tested. Noted that it is a much more difficult feat to accomplish in a full blown browser rather than network layer.

[adzm]

One of my fav party tricks when I get on someone's Wi-Fi is to search for an obscure disease with an expensive treatment. Everyone in the geographical area seems to start getting ads for it for a while afterwards!

[citizenpaul]

Please tell us you have a list to share.

[al_borland]

Try Mullvad’s browser. It does a lot more to avoid user fingerprinting, even locking the resolution of the rendered content to various sizes. There are some things that make it less practical as a daily driver, but it seems good as a secondary browser for private mode.

[EbNar]

"Incognito", on ANY browser, is not meant for that. Is meant to not leave traces on your PC, so your son/daughter/wife/husband can't see you've been watching porn (for instance). You're still tracked by the sites you visit, unless you use some kind of blocker (and, even then, you may still be tracked server-side).

[Nathanba]

The firefox private window seems to work better than the chrome incognito mode. Maybe brave would be even better because I tested brave against fingerprinting libraries once and it was the best at avoiding any detection.

[blahlabs]

Brave confuses me. On one hand it seems to have quite good privacy tech, but then on the other hand there are instances of what seem to be quite shady actions. Both impressions come from comments and anecdotes, I have not looked into it myself.

[happymellon]

Brave is the preppers/tea party/Jan 6th browser.

Deeply paranoid people can have occasional good arguments mixed in with their sociopathic traits. The fact that Brave didn't fork Firefox, or build their own like Ladybird implies to me that they are not really trying to improve the system. It's like Windows users extolling the virtues of the LTSC version.

[blahlabs]

Yes, also in hindsight of my comment, there is nothing inherently conflicting about those two sides of brave. I think my impression was that because they valued privacy, it follows they should be more 'on the level', or something. Which is clearly absurd.

[akimbostrawman]

The only one reading tea leafs here to criticize a browser is you. This website is not reddit but about technical discussions.

[skydhash]

I was trying Chrome on a work computer (because why not, I'm only doing work stuff on it). That incognito (but not really) mode made me download Firefox in an hurry.

[saintfire]

How does Firefox improve on icognito?

I haven't used chrome in a long time but as far as I was aware they do the same thing: wipe session data on close.

[skydhash]

If you add your Google account into chrome, it will bring it into Incognito mode.

[mh-]

I don't experience this at all; in what way are you saying?

[jsnell]

That is not true.