What is Private Browsing for?

Its mainly for porn. But also it stops you from saving any info about the site if you don’t want any cookies stored or passwords to be remembered. If you are on a public computer and don’t want any of your information stored at all you can turn this on. I think it also might stop the websites from remembering you on their own server.

I think it also might stop the websites from remembering you on their own server.
It does not do that part. It only affects what your browser saves to your computer.

The rest of @jackm‘s is great and adding a little more,
Private Mode also prevents saving browsing history, cookies, cached images and pages, the saved information (address, phone, etc.) that automatically pops up in forms.

As @jackm says, if you are using someone else’s computer, it’s a good thing for any password-protected site.

@jackm: No, it wouldn’t stop the websites from remembering you. Not if the website is well-written. For example, if I were hosting Fluther… In order to protect myself (as the owner) against being persecuted for whatever content my users upload, I would write a very basic python script that captures the user’s IP address and stores it in a mysql database. None of the user’s settings would stop me from doing that, since by accessing the site they activate the python scripts in order to load the webpage.

@Jerikao I would disagree. The only way to guarantee being able to track users is cookies. Most IPs are shared these days (sometimes by thousands of people) so logging a visit from an IP is essentially meaningless. It would be like saying “I know what country you’re from” equates to knowing who are you.

Also there are 4.3B IP addresses and nearly 7B people (and while not everyone is on the internet, many people use multiple IPs). The math just doesn’t add up for what you’re saying—there’s no way to uniquely identify a person from an IP.

@jackm No, it only deletes the “memories” from the user’s end, it does nothing server-side.

Private browsing is good too if you have snoops for kids/roommates/SOs around christmas holiday time.

@timtrueman Yes, much of what we do is tracked on our PCs with cookies. But IPs are used, too. Wikipedia, for example, tracks IPs. There have been some interesting revelations. Like an article about XYZAcme Corporation repeatedly whitewashed by users with XYZAcme IP addresses, removing all negative info.

I’ve only used it for porn, but I can see other applications being useful.

@timtrueman With proper warrants, there is. What you do is to identify the offending IP, then approach the providing ISP with a proper wire-tap warrant (not wire-tap… But I know which I mean… I just can’t come up with what it’s called. XD). The ISP is then able to narrow down the specific connection it leased that IP address to during that specific time period. By doing this, they are able to determine at the very least what physical location accessed the website.

@jaytkay @jerikao I agree with you guys but it’s even more tricky than that because IP addresses can be spoofed and there’s always tunneling (see this very informative video). My guess is an IP address wouldn’t stand up in a court as “evidence” unless combined with other concrete evidence. Either way I’d say Private Browsing is very much private browsing as long as it’s not illegal activity—because it’s extremely unlikely anyone will ever know what you were visiting.

Private Browsing isn’t for porn, it’s for ”personal matters and images” which I have code named to be XXX. They may or may not rest in a folder called “Tentacle” but you can’t prove that.