Privacy is not something that should be taken for granted. When you go online, you expose yourself, and someone could be spying on you without your awareness. Even your favorite apps have the potential to intrude on your privacy. They are accumulating data on you, even if they are not out to steal your banking information. There are a few ways to safeguard your privacy. Incognito mode and a virtual private network, or VPN, are two popular methods.
Our awareness of the importance of staying safe when using the internet is growing, as is our desire to retain our privacy while doing so from the comfort of our own homes. That isn’t to argue that our grasp of how to keep safe online isn’t increasing. There are a variety of methods for remaining anonymous online that have become popular, each with differing degrees of success and ability.
Two of the most popular solutions for internet privacy are VPNs and Incognito Mode. While browsing on the VPN, a VPN makes you tougher to monitor, while Incognito Mode provides you a new browser that doesn’t remember your history—and won’t give you away to websites.
What is Incognito Mode?
InPrivate in Microsoft Edge and Incognito Mode in Google Chrome are two examples of private browsing. Its objective is to give your browser amnesia for a short period of time. When you visit a website in incognito mode, your browser will not save any information about the site you visited: no addresses, no cookies, no information you input, nothing.
You can also use Incognito Mode to get a clean browser session without any cookies. If you’re logged in to Facebook in a regular browser window, you can start an Incognito Mode window and Facebook won’t see you as logged in while you surf.
Nothing you do in your browser will be remembered when you browse in Incognito Mode. Your history and the “recently visited” tab will not show up if you visit a website. If you sign in to a website and then dismiss the window, your browser will forget you ever signed in.
What is a VPN?
When you connect to a VPN, it connects to the internet through a private server, making it look as if that server is viewing a website instead of you. In other words, the websites you visit will not be able to see your true IP address. They will be able to view the VPN’s IP address.
This increases your overall browsing privacy, with the extra benefit of allowing you to fake your location to any region where your VPN has servers. Websites will think you’re browsing from the VPN server’s location rather than your own. This lets you to bypass region limitations on Netflix, for example, or utilize internet banking when on vacation. In totalitarian nations, it’s also a wonderful technique to avoid online restriction and tracking.
This increases your overall browsing privacy, with the extra benefit of allowing you to fake your location to any region where your VPN has servers. Websites will think you’re browsing from the VPN server’s location rather than your own. This lets you to bypass region limitations on Netflix, for example, or utilize internet banking when on vacation.
In totalitarian nations, it’s also a wonderful technique to avoid online restriction and tracking. All of this makes VPNs popular among a diverse group of users, including average people who value their privacy, human rights activists living in hostile regimes, and BitTorrent users looking to download the latest movies.
Difference between Incognito Mode and a VPN:
1. While both VPN and incognito mode provide users with privacy protection, the extent of these functions varies. In each browsing session, the users can benefit from the privacy advantages provided by the private network.
When users join the virtual private network, the connection is encrypted, making it impossible for a third party to track their online activities. The government, corporations, hackers, and internet service providers are all included.
In contrast, the incognito mode only provides privacy for users when they use the private browsing mode, and it can only hide the users’ browsing behaviour. It does not encrypt the user’s connection, allowing the government or ISP to monitor their surfing habits.
2. Users can enjoy system-wide protection and privacy in their online activities using a VPN, which means that the entire device, not just the browser, is encrypted. Third parties will be absolutely unaware of any data transmissions that consumers perform using their device.
This is in contrast to the private browsing mode, which only provides online privacy for that specific browser and browsing session. It primarily just masks your browsing history, and any data transmissions you do while in incognito mode are not encrypted.
The privacy here simply means that anyone who uses the same browser on the same device as you cannot recover your browsing history while in private browsing mode.
3. As long as you activate your private network connection throughout your surfing activity, you can keep your data transmission hidden. As a result, no one will be able to read your information because it will be encrypted during transmission.
The government, ISP, or hackers have no way of knowing what data you send, what passwords you write, or what websites you visit. Incognito mode, on the other hand, only hides your browser data from other people who use the same computer as you.
It does not protect your data from the government or your Internet service provider. Even if hackers attempt to intercept your data transmission, they will be able to do so because your connection is unencrypted.
4. The VPN service protects your online privacy and security at the connection level by encrypting your ordinary internet connection with their secret servers. With this capability, you browse the internet as if you were visiting websites from a different location dependent on the server you are using.
Any online activity you undertake on your device will be completely safeguarded once you establish this private connection. However, because the privacy feature is only applied at the browser level, incognito mode will use your regular connection without encrypting it. As a result, whatever you do online outside of incognito mode is not protected.
