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Comment by bobbyi_settv | Hacker News Reader

I love that we continue to refer to private/ incognito browsing as something mainly used "when you’re planning a surprise party or gift".

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My main use of incognito mode is to prevent my YouTube recommendations from being filled with music videos or fringe news bullshit

If you forget to enter incognito mode, you can just clear cookies for the day as well.

recommendations are not driven by cookies.

What are they driven by then? My youtube recommendations reset completely every time I clear my cookies.

Your user account, if you're logged in to google

Only if you use Youtube without logging in. Otherwise, your watch history is stored in your account so the cleaning of the cookies does nothing.

I’m saddened by this aspect of YouTube whereby you’re afraid to explore the site without tanking your recommendations. I wish there was a site that focused on finding YouTube videos in a more focused way rather than some rogue ML algorithm that decides to spam you with weird topics. I don’t feel like I have any control over my YouTube account anymore.

Sadly this feeling is only going to get more common

I use Incognito mainly to let my friends log into their accounts for a minute on my computer, if they desperately need to e.g. make a bank transaction or an Amazon purchase or something using some combination of my information and theirs, where I can type stuff in (e.g. my shipping address) and they can type stuff in (e.g. their login credentials.)

Porn browsing, meanwhile, is much better done with a secondary dedicated Chrome profile.

Probably a better idea to use `firefox --ProfileManager` for that. That way you don't risk exposing your bookmarks, history, active logins, etc

Chrome profiles don't require you to log into them. They pop up a login prompt on the welcome screen, but you don't have to use it.

I would recommend actually using it, though—with a dedicated porn-browsing Google Account, that you created once upon a time in an internet cafe, using Mailinator or the like as the recovery email. After all, nothing gets people to keep digging more than a layer of anonymity; and nothing gets people to stop digging more than finding what seems to be a real person who "uses" a bunch of services like Google, Facebook, etc. all with the same email.

It's slightly amusing, but it's sad that we still have to act taboo around sexual subjects.

The couple of times i've actually used incognito mode for planning a surprise or buying a gift it's definitely put a smile on my face to realize i'm being a euphamism.

I use incognito when logging into my banks because I don't 100% trust the ad blockers and other extensions.

That said now that I know banks have google analytics in them, I really wonder whether I'm better off trusting the extensions.......

I mean I use it for personal stuff at work, for disposable browser environments for testing frontend content and bugs and for quickly handling AWS environments ... By far my use of incognito for mundane tasks outstrips its use for porn.

I used to do that but now I mainly use firefox container tabs. My main usecase being able to use the website as an admin and as a regular user at the same time.

I kind of wonder if it is even that private.

I use little snitch on mac, and I still continue to get Firefox connect dialogs for private tabs long after they were closed.

Safari on mac does not exhibit that behavior.

thought bubble: "Heyy, you could use porn mode for that!"

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