Private Browsing is Not Private... but there are some things it's good for
Everyone who browses the internet

While private browsing is anything but private, there are some good reasons to use it, but none of them are related to hiding your activities, as you aren’t going to hide anything by using private browsing. Every site you visit is logged by your ISP and most of the time by the site you’re visiting. Your IP address is being logged; private browsing does not hide your IP address. Yet many people think they’re skulking around the Internet anonymously when they are using private browsing, but alas anonymity requires a lot more than using a browser’s private browsing mode. If it’s not private, then what good is it?

1. Use Private Browsing when you don’t want cookies or temp files from sites you’ve visited stored on your computer. Using private browsing doesn’t store cookies or the site URLs you visit on the local computer. If you’re a lady looking for a new husband, you don’t have to worry about your husband looking through your temp files and finding photos of your new prospective husband or cookies from www.soyourelookingforanewhusband.com – or EB’s favorite www.sugardaddy4ubaby.com. I only know EB frequents that site because I snuck up on her while she was perusing a gaggle of shirtless, fat, rich, old men.

2. Logging into multiple accounts from the same computer: If you’re logged into, let’s say one of your Gmail accounts and you try to log into another it will make you sign out of the account you’re logged into (there’s a way around this but that’s for another issue). If you want to open another Gmail account, etc. just open private browsing, and log into the other account. If you want to log into 5 Gmail accounts, for example, at one time just open 4 private browsing windows.

3. Search without cookies that identify you: You can search Amazon or PayPal etc. from a private browsing Window without seeing it come up on searches you perform when you’re logged into a site. Since cookies are not carried over from a private browsing session, sites cannot use them to identify you when you search using private mode, and then log into the site to purchase. This also provides you with a means whereby you can check the contents of a site as a new user and compare prices to make sure aren’t getting better prices than members. Hey, it happens all the time.

4. Checking email or browsing from someone else’s (or a public) computer. When need to check your email, check an account, or browse on someone else’s computer may want to use private browsing for that because browsing history, email provider, and accounts are not saved to the computer. Private browsing never saves web history, cookies or web data.

So private browsing is useful for a lot of things, but not for hiding your identity from your ISP, the FBI, the NSA, the famous super-sleuth, EB, or the websites you visit, I tells ya.

Oh, and we almost forgot – here are some keyboard shortcuts for launching a private browsing session:

Firefox and Microsoft Edge: Ctrl+Shift+P launches a new private browsing window.

Chrome, Brave, and Opera: Ctrl+Shift+N is the shortcut to open a new private browsing (incognito) window.

And there you go – everything you ever wanted to know about private browsing but were afraid to ask. 

How to Stop Windows from Tracking Everything You Do
Windows 10 / Windows 11

Yep! Windows Tracks Everything You Do?

Did you know that whether you’re using Windows 10 or Windows 11, Windows tracks everything you do. It’s called Timeline and Activity history in Windows 10 and Activity History in Windows 11.

If you don’t want Windows tracking everything you do on your computer here’s how to turn off Activity history and clear history already recorded.

Windows 10

Open Settings (Windows key + i ) and click on Privacy

In the left-hand pane, click on Activity history.

Under the “Manage your activity history” section, you’ll see two options:

Store my activity history on this device: Toggle the switch to Off if you don’t want Windows to store your activity history on your device.

Send my activity history to Microsoft: Toggle the switch to Off to prevent Windows from sending your activity history to Microsoft.

Disabling both options will completely turn off Activity history

To clean up what Windows has already recorded, scroll down a bit further, and under “Clear activity history” click the “Clear” button.

Windows 11

Open Settings (Windows key + i)

In Settings click on “Privacy & security”

Under “Privacy & security” scroll down find “Activity history” and click on it.

In the “Activity history” dialog, toggle the switch next to “Store my activity history on this device” to the Off position.

And next to “Clear activity history for this account”, click on “Clear history”.