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montgomery_r | 7 months ago

Salzberg states several times that one should browse in 'private' or 'incognito' mode to stop 3rd party tracking. This is false. Incognito mode stops data such as web history and cookies being stored on the computer you are using - it is good (enough) for obscuring what sites you have visited from other people who may have access to your computer. (It may not defeat a deep forensic search, it might save you from family embarrassment). Incognito mode does not hide any data at all from your ISP, your DNS server, or the web servers you visit - it does not do anything to defeat 3rd party tracking. An error of this magnitude does make me wonder whether any of his other propositions are true at all.

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degamad|7 months ago

> it does not do anything to defeat 3rd party tracking

It does reduce the footprint of data able to be correlated across browser restarts, which is not nothing, but is much less than most people assume.

So everything you do on this visit can be correlated, but when you close your browser and then come back, you're a new person not associated with your previous visit.

fruitworks|7 months ago

A new person with an identical browser fingerprint and IP

JohnFen|7 months ago

Good catch!

It's almost as if being an expert in one thing doesn't give you any expertise in a completely unrelated thing.

neuroticnews25|7 months ago

Incognito mode in Chrome does block third party cookies.