What incognito mode actually turns off (and what it doesn't)

What's actually different: storage, not visibility

Normal browsing keeps a persistent local store on your device - cookies, browsing history, cached files, local storage that websites write to. Incognito mode gives your browser session a fresh, temporary version of all of that, isolated from your normal profile, and throws it away the moment you close the window. That's genuinely useful: sites won't recognize you from previous visits, and nothing from the session lingers on your device afterward.

That's also the entire scope of what changes. Nothing about how your traffic travels across the network is any different.

What was never affected in the first place

Your ISP still sees which domains you connect to, the same as always - incognito mode runs entirely on your device and has no effect on the network path your traffic takes. If you're on a work or school network, the same network-level monitoring that would normally apply still applies. And the moment you log into an account - your email, a shopping site, anything - that service knows exactly who you are, incognito or not, because you just told it.

The technical mechanism: a separate storage partition

Under the hood, most browsers implement private browsing by spinning up an isolated, in-memory (or temporary-on-disk) storage partition for cookies, cacheCacheA copy of data kept somewhere faster to read from than its original source, so repeated requests don't have to pay the full cost every time. Deliberately allowed to be wrong or empty - a cache miss should never be treated as an error., and site data, completely separate from your normal profile's partition. Regular tabs read and write to one partition; incognito tabs read and write to another. When the incognito window closes, that partition is simply discarded rather than persisted - there was never a "delete history" step happening, because nothing was written to permanent storage to begin with.

Why sites can sometimes still recognize you

Cookies are blocked from persisting, but a site can still try to identify your browser through fingerprinting - characteristics like your screen size, installed fonts, timezone, and browser version, combined together, that can be similar enough across visits to make a reasonable guess it's the same device, cookies or not. Incognito mode doesn't defend against this at all, because fingerprinting doesn't rely on anything incognito mode clears.

The general lesson underneath the specific feature

"Where is this data actually stored, and who controls that storage" is a question worth asking about almost any privacy or security feature, not just incognito mode - the same distinction (what's cleared locally versus what's visible to a server or a network in between) determines what a feature like clearing cookies, using a VPN, or logging out of an account each actually accomplish, and none of them do what the other ones do.