It is commonly accepted that true privacy is hard to find considering how so much of the technology around us records what we do. Specifically phones, computers, and other smart devices, somehow knowing things like what you were looking to buy or what news you prefer seeing.
One of the biggest contributors to this is the use of search engines or web browsers. A double edged sword, as it provides us with so much information but at the same time we give a lot of information back to it. Both knowingly and unknowingly, and the fact is that most of them do.
What about Privacy Options like “Incognito Mode”?
Now of course if you were ever even slightly concerned about your privacy you’d think of trying out the different privacy features the browser you already use has. The most famous one being of course Chrome’s “Incognito Mode” which upon first glance seems to do the trick, since you can’t find the things you’ve looked up yourself.
But this mode only really provides extra privacy for those who also use the same device like on a shared family computer. As Chrome itself says that websites, servers you’re connected to, or your ISP still have access.
Which Web Browsers Are Spying On You?
The most well-known ones to do so are of course Chrome and Safari, as they come stock in very popular smart devices like Android and IOS phones. Aside from those two there are also other popular search engines like Firefox, Edge, Bing, and Yahoo!
All of these spy on you, feeding what you search into different advertiser’s algorithms in order to cater what you want to you. Given that though it might not be so bad, right? After all that means it’s also showing you more of what you want.
Consequences of a Lack of Privacy
As much as these things might not seem to affect, they can given that the algorithms are told to. With your search patterns, links you click, headings of articles you stop at, and places you frequent on the internet these algorithms can do quite a bit.
The scariest of course being they can cater information and content to you in such a way that you want to get into it. Or even convince you to change stances on something, this is of course only if the tech companies wanted to. But at that point why take the risk?
What Private Browsers Do for You
Changing to a private browser though like Brave, Tor, Vivaldi or DuckDuckGo have a number of benefits as well as additional features depending on which one you pick. The simple way to explain the difference is that on Chrome it sort of passes you through a filter that says what habits it’s noticed of you before giving you the results.
With these private browsers they give you a disguise when going through these filters. That way it just gives you a default result no matter what you’ve searched before. The complete privacy ends at any website that asks you to log in, or that you have an account on.