*Cough Cough...* Chrome... *Chough*...

Everytime this is reposted in a new template I remind everyone that no one is using incognito mode to hide from their ISP they are using it to hide from their spouse or partner.

I also use private mode for searching things that I myself would be appalled to find in my own search history.
- That's pretty advanced usage - hiding stuff from yourself.
- Or occasionally just when I'm looking up something stupid and don't want to see advertisements for the next two weeks for it.
- I produce a podcast that gets us into some twisted corners of the internet. Especially when I fact check things for the other hosts. Mullvad + proton VPN always up, no question.
I mainly use it for random things that I don't want to influence my recommendations, like clickbait YouTube videos.
- also good for temporarily logging in to an account on a service without logging out of your regular one on main
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.
- That's an option you can disable, no need for incognito
My wife knows I watch porn occasionally. I don’t need the obvious URL’s popping up whenever I start typing.b
I’m not even hiding it in the sense that I’m being sneaky. My spouse just rather not see it in the suggestions!
It’s for wanking. That’s it. It only ever goes to pornhub
- I'm in my thirties, single for years and occasionally make sexual jokes. People know I fap. Everyone faps (huh, could be the title for an educational children's book..), I don't hide my browser history. Other question is who from? I live alone.
- no there is also a second use. to search answers for questins you're too embarassed about
I use it for Xmas shopping and for when I don't want a site to auto login with any of my sessions.
- Firefox containers
  Put all your accounts in different containers and just open the page outside of them (also great for multilogging and not being cookie tracked)
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.
Sometimes to browse deals on hotels, planes, ISP, mobile cell providers, but mostly porn
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).
- Yeah thats why I use Firefox Focus on mobile. It has no feature to save history. I use normal Firefox in case I want to save history or login permanently
Because different accounts are not possible on every OS, right?
- Browser profiles serve very different needs from OS level accounts.

I always thought private browsing was just so all the porn content doesn't stay in search history's and the address bar doesn't auto fill fatasshonkeybabes.com if my grandmother sits down to look at her Facebooks.

That is exactly what it is.
- And it was always clearly stated as such. It's absurd that anyone was upset by this. I have yet to find a single user on here who did not properly understand what it was for, or at least none willing admit to being that dumb.
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.

The ISP can see every domain, but not every page. That's what HTTPS everywhere was all about.

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.
- The future is now, old man.
They can see the entire URL, not just the domain. They just can't see the contents themselves. But they can still see "dudesfuckingfurniture.com/gettingfreakywithadresser.mpeg"
Edit: I might be wrong
- When it comes to HTTPS, this is just plain wrong on a technical level.
- It's actually more secure than that.
  https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/https-protect/
  They'd see the URL, but not the specific page.
  They'd also theoretically see the size of the URL, and the size of the page, along with the transport type. So they can infer a lot of information from the exchange, but they couldn't say for sure what you were viewing on a specific website.
- Are you sure? The file path after the domain would not be necessary for an ISP to see, only the domain. I'm not sure how all that works, but it's definitely not a technical requirement thay they can see the complete URL.

The fact anyone ever thought this was for any reason other than making it easier to hide your porn browsing history from your mom is just silly.

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.
That and" stalking" people on LinkedIn

Assuming you're using https, your ISP cannot see what pages you visit. It can only see what website you access (IP address).

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.

At a minimum this meme maker has no idea how TLS, browsers, cookies, or DNS work.

Um, if you use their DNS they do. Some ISPs force that in fact.
- How can the ISP force their dns? They can't know where you got the destination ip from.
- No, a lot will default to that, but they can’t force you to use any particular dns server. I mean they can, buts a fcc violation at that point I believe
TLS doesn’t encrypt the host name of the urls you are visiting and DNS traffic is insanely easy to sniff even if you aren’t using your ISPs service.

Only in Chrome? In every browser using private mode, private mode only delete the local storage (wbSQL, Serviceworkers, cookies, cache, etc), no other things, it hide nothing, for webpages which log you (or the search engine you use, AI and some other extensions which you use in "private"mode) it's irrelevant if you use private or normal mode. It's a very frecuent missconcept to believe that the private mode is the same as anonym browsing, simple extensions, like Cookie Autodelete or SiteBleacher do exactly the same as browsing in private mode, but with the feature that you can partial or full whitelist the pages where private mode isn't needed.

More or less Private only if you use VPN, SPN, MPR, Snowflake or at least a proxie.

The one word more people need to know about: threatmodel

Its true for every browser except Tor.

I think Firefox uses DoH by default in certain places
- Hey there, I have been lately trying to better understand how privacy/my network work lately. I’m kind of right at that line where the next barrier gets pretty technical. I think I have a decent understanding of DoH, but I know it has quite click for me yet. How would you describe it? (I’m assuming that is an acronym for DNS over HTTP?)

Encrypted DNS anyone? (NextDNS for example)

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.
- DoT also encrypts the request, so the ISP cannot spy on the Domain Name you have requested.
  And thanks to Https the ISP only sees the IP address which cannot in every case be resolved to a unique Domain, especially large sites that are hosted on service providers like Cloudflare, amazon etc etc

Also VPNs see everything you do, but please, again, enlighten me how paying some OTHER corporation somehow better protects me from corporations?

It protects you only if you have chosen the right VPN provider.
Of course if you choose some random VPN that was advertised in a youtube video that may as well be a downgrade depending on what your ISP does with your data already.
But if you choose a honest VPN provider, who's values aligns with yours, and does not share (neither collect) any data on your usage and traffic, then that can easily be better.
Also keep in mind that ISP's often operate knowing that they are the only provider in the area. Or the only usable one, or that the others aren't better either. There's no competition, and they make use of the fact that they can do whatever they want that is legal (a lot of things is), because the user can't just switch to another that does not do it.
However, there's a competition between VPNs. Unfortunately most of that competition is driven by lies, but fortunately not all of it is.

A VPN is only a single end point just like your ISP meaning you are only shifting the problem to your VPN provider who admittedly is more trustworthy than your ISP but you are still putting an immense amount of trust into a single point of failure.
If you truly want to hide from your ISP or really anyone, your only options are to use TOR or I2P where your traffic is encrypted and tumbled through multiple servers.
So your threat model assumes an actor with a quantum computer capable of breaking RSA, but not a regular computer capable of filtering by IP address?

Replace ISP with VPN, if you use them.