Google Chrome incognito is private, but your boss can still see what you search

Chrome is on your boss’s side!

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If you have been doing all the NSFW things in office thinking the Google Chrome’s incognito will save you, you may need to rethink your strategy. As it turns out, while Chrome’s incognito mode is claimed to be private, it can still be accessed by your employer.

Google Developer, Darin Fisher, who helped create Chrome, told online mag Thrillist, “When you launch the incognito tab there’s this disclaimer there where we really try to help make it really clear to people that your activity is certainly still visible to the websites you visit and could be visible to your employer, to your school, and to your ISP [internet service provider] of course”. You never really read that disclaimer, did you? It’s fine, none of us did.

In fact, if you open the incognito window now, you will see that beside the warning of your activity is visible to your employee or school, the disclaimer also reads that your activity “might still be visible to” the websites you visit, “including the ads and resources used on those sites”. It also warns that “Pages that you view in incognito tabs won’t stick around in your browser’s history, cookie store or search history after you’ve closed all of your incognito tabs.”

“Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be kept. However, you aren’t invisible. Going incognito doesn’t hide your browsing from your employer, your Internet service provider or the websites that you visit.”

Incognito is instead recommended for avoiding unwanted cookies and keeping web use secret from other users of the same device, Fisher told Thrillist. Fisher also revealed that Google struggled and was “agonized” over the name for Incognito that didn’t oversell the limited privacy that the mode provides. (Smart!)

This essentially means, if you are using your school, college or office computer systems, you can well enough use incognito to avoid cookies and search history, but do not expect no one to know what you searched there, because they can and probably will!