Incognito mode has one job: keeping your browsing history off your device. That’s it. No cookies saved, no history stored, no autofill remembered. If you share a computer with a sibling or roommate, yeah — they won’t see what you looked up. That’s genuinely useful.
But your school? Your employer? Your internet provider? They can still see where you’re browsing.
Mozilla puts it plainly: your ISP has access to your browsing activity pretty much no matter what you do. Incognito doesn’t change that. When you’re on school Wi-Fi or a work network, the people running that network can still see every site you visit — private mode or not.
The word “private” is what trips everyone up. It means private from other people using the same device. It does not mean private from the outside world. The sites you visit can still see your IP address too — that doesn’t disappear just because you opened a new window.
If you actually want to hide your traffic from your network or ISP, that’s what a VPN does. Even then, it’s not a perfect invisibility cloak — but it’s a completely different tool than incognito mode. They’re not the same thing at all.
So use incognito for what it’s good at — keeping your search history off a shared device, logging out of accounts automatically, that kind of thing. Just don’t count on it to protect you from anyone outside your screen.