Anonymity · guides

Private browser: what it blocks, and what incognito never did

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated · 6 min read

This is the entrance to the anonymity tower: private browsers, proxies, fingerprinting, and the machinery that recognises you before you have logged in to anything at all.

One idea will run through every floor and it is worth having before you climb. Anonymity is not a setting you switch on. It is the absence of things that identify you, there are more of them than any one setting covers, and they do not fail all at once — they fail one at a time, quietly, usually because of something you did rather than something the software got wrong. The floors will go through them in the order they actually matter, which is not the order the marketing puts them in.

The most common mistake this tower exists to correct is a single word. People say private when they mean one of three completely different things: not being tracked by advertisers, not being seen by whoever runs the network, or not being identifiable at all. Those need different tools, and the third one is a different discipline rather than a different product. Every floor will say which of the three it is talking about, in the first paragraph.

Much of this tower is being built and is not here yet, and the boxes below say which guides are open and which are not, so this page names what exists rather than pointing upstairs. Five guides already cover part of it: turning private browsing off on an iPhone, the one cache an iPhone actually lets you clear, the two different commands a Mac calls clearing the cache, what each app-permission screen on an iPhone really shows, and what the orange dot reports, and about what. Next door are Tor and VPNs.

There is also a question of proportion that the tower tries to keep in view. Two different goals sit behind this question, and they are worth separating. One is to disappear. The other is to stop being followed around by advertising, to keep a browsing history out of the hands of a company that sells it, and to know which of the two is actually happening. The second is achievable in an afternoon with free tools. The rest of the building is for the case where the requirement is genuinely stronger, and it says so rather than selling the same advice twice at different volumes.

Where to start

Five ways in. The second is by far the most common question people arrive with, and the answer surprises almost everybody who asks it.

“Which browser should I actually use?”
Start at browsers and accounts
“Isn’t incognito mode enough?”
Short answer, long floor, in browsers and accounts
“I need this to be right, not approximately right.”
A tunnel is the wrong tool — Tor browser, Tails and onion services
“Who can still see the sites I open?”
The name lookup is not the tunnel: What is private DNS, and what it does not hide

Browsers and accounts

What a browser or an account shows about you, and to whom. The guides here are open; the boxes are not, and each one that arrives will answer the same three questions: what it blocks the moment you install it, what it sends back to the company that makes it, and what it explicitly does not claim to do.

Deleting an Instagram accountThe username is not burned, and the export has to be downloaded before you start.Open this guide → Deactivating one insteadA pause with no stated deadline — and it can only be used once a week.Open this guide → The orange dot on iPhoneA report rather than a fault — and the green one tells you less than it looks.Open this guide → Instagram and screenshotsTwo documented cases, three words that narrow them, and the way round it Instagram names itself.Open this guide →
BraveWhat the browser blocks by default, and the parts of it that are a business model.Being built
Incognito modeExactly what it deletes, and the long list of people who can still see everything.Open this guide → Blocking incognito modeThe same setting from the other side of the room, and how well the block holds device by device.Open this guide →

Not covered here. It will not promise invisibility. Nothing sold to consumers delivers it, and the products that imply otherwise are selling a feeling. The honest ceiling for an ordinary person is being harder to follow and cheaper to lose interest in, which is worth a great deal and is not the same thing.

It will not tell somebody at genuine risk that a browser is enough. If the consequence of being identified is serious, the answer involves habits, separation and other people’s advice, not a download. That floor will be short, and most of it will be a list of places better equipped than we are.

And it will not carry affiliate links, which in this category means declining the browsers and services that pay best for exactly this kind of page.

One last thing about how these floors will be written. Claims about what a browser blocks are taken from the maker’s own documentation with the date attached, and wherever it is possible the floor will end with a test you can run yourself instead of a claim you have to believe. This subject attracts confident writing and very little verification, and the difference between the two is the only thing that makes a page like this worth keeping. What holds instead is simple: no product on these floors is sold as invisibility, and no floor carries an affiliate link.

Written by Alberto Gulotta

Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.

Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.

Written on 20 August 2026 · last checked 30 September 2026.

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