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Dumb question: Do browsers actually notify websites when the user is in incognito mode?

Or is it just presenting the user as a blank state with no cookies or other local season data?

I’ve always assumed the latter. So I’ve never assumed any implicit agreement that websites would turn off logging when I showed up in incognito mode.

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Websites aren't supposed to be able to tell when a user is in incognito. That hasn't stopped them in the past though. Ever notice some news sites with N free articles per month would refuse to load if you were in Incognito?

It has been a cat and mouse back and forth between these site operators finding ways to detect incognito sessions and browser developers fixing them. They've had some creative methods in the past like inspecting the size and availability of the local storage.

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