Memes

I also use private mode for searching things that I myself would be appalled to find in my own search history.

I mainly use it for random things that I don't want to influence my recommendations, like clickbait YouTube videos.

Beyond that it's legitimately useful for logging into a second account on a site or for various testing purposes as a web developer. Though if you're consistently using it for the former, containers are a better solution.

...and so that typing in a url doesn't automatically auto fill with a site you'd rather not let anyone else see.

Eh, or they just don't want a forever history stored on their own computer any more than they want it stored on someone else's computer.

It’s for wanking. That’s it. It only ever goes to pornhub

I’m not even hiding it in the sense that I’m being sneaky. My spouse just rather not see it in the suggestions!

i use private windows mainly so i don't clutter up browser histories with useless stuff i won't go back to (if i do run across something to save, it gets bookmarked or printed to pdf).

No doubt. Whoever’s making these memes obviously wasn’t around when Incognito/Private browsing was introduced. It was never advertised as hiding anything from your ISP.

I mainly use it so my wife doesn't see the stupid crap I look up

That is exactly what it is.

Private browsing in Google Chrome will not store your browsing data locally into your computer; but Google will still keep that data in their own records.

And hopefully in the future they won't even he able to see the domain. I wonder why they never considered giving out certificates for IPs to solve this problem. Seemed like the easiest solution to me.

That's pretty much all I use it for. To keep my porn browsing off of my history.

Not to hide it from anyone, I don't live with my mother anymore and I don't think my SO would care. More so that when I google something, I don't get porn auto complete entries in my everyday browsing.

I'm fully aware that my traffic is able to be monitored by my ISP (at least to the extent that there's a connection that exists. HTTPS is still not capable of being easily decrypted), and my DNS is resolving the address for the porn sites, and that Google (or whatever search engine) is logging that the search happened.... Or that the sites see my connection, from my IP, and know what I watched.

My only objective is that they can't link that to my normal browsing or accounts.

You know all those "share on"... Twitter/Facebook/whatever links? When they load, from Facebook, it asks the referer URL, and checks the browser for any cookies that might associate that browsing to a person for ad customization. Incognito isolates that information, so while Facebook/X(Twitter)/whoever may know that someone went to that URL, they have no cookie data to link it to a person uniquely, so they have information that the site was visited, but no idea who visited the site since any session cookies I have for those services are in my non-incognito browser.

The typical default configuration has the ISP providing DNS services (and even if you use an external DNS provider, the default configuration there is that the DNS traffic itself isn't encrypted from the ISP's ability to analyze).

So even if you visit a site that is hosted on some big service, where the IP address might not reveal what you're looking at (like visiting a site hosted or cached by Cloudflare or AWS), the DNS lookup might at least reveal the domain you're visiting.

Still, the domain itself doesn't reveal the URL that follows the domain.

So if you do a Google search for "weird sexual fetishes," that might cause you to visit the URL:

https://www.google.com/search?q=weird+sexual+fetishes

Your ISP can see that you visited the www.google.com domain, but can't see what search you actually performed.

There are different tricks and tips for keeping certain things private from certain observers, so splitting up the actual ISP from the DNS resolver from the website itself might be helpful and scattering pieces of information, but some of those pieces of information will inevitably have to be shared with someone.

That solves a completely different problem. The ISP can still see who you requested data from.

That's more about security around retrieving the correct IP address from a DNS query, and doesn't do that much for privacy.