What a waste of time. What do you mean which one is best?
Image by Bru-No from Pixabay
Free VS paid, new online identity compared to no history or cookies on the device.
Before we begin, can you guess which one is best?
Is a VPN the best between these two, and if so why? Why isn’t private browsing the best alternative here? I’ve read quite a few posts online regarding these two , and in my opinion, anything besides saying that these two services serve a different purpose leads us astray. Make no mistake though, these can be used together.
Have you ever thought about putting these two together, doing this might help us understand how each of these two services helps us?
We’re not here to define these services but, still, most of us fail to understand the purpose of each and where both come in handy in our everyday activities.
With or without a VPN service private browsing helps if you use a computer at home or at the office that is used by more people.
At work– Your network administrator can see more about your browsing activity without a VPN service because you simply use the internet using the IP offered by your service provider, and nothing comes in between the connection from your device to whatever website you visit.
Thanks to HTTPS your internet traffic is encrypted. This isn’t in clear text but it’s still possible to see the websites that you visited, even though it’s impossible to see what you do on the website.
What we shouldn’t forget is that on websites such as Medium and YouTube there’s only so much that can be done right? Either you’re writing or reading an article. On YouTube, we watch videos and or upload some ourselves and at times we can do both.
In other words, depending on the website you visit it is possible at times to find out what you do, because one can only do so much. Here’s a simple scenario;
You find Medium traffic on a device that I used to visit the site for at least a few hours only to then check my profile and realize I have a new story up.
Doesn’t that tell you anything about my activity on the website earlier that day? Surely there are other possibilities like me having written and saved the story days prior to this one but for whatever reason logging in recently and publishing that article took place. So, in one way or another we can sometimes connect the dots.
With your browsing history (when private/incognito isn’t active we can verify whatever article or video was watched during a session) because everything is saved on our device and by going to our history tab we can see everything.
At home — Wiping everything after using the device we can make sure nobody else has access to our browsing history, online accounts, and temporary files. This may not necessarily mean that people at home might use the information against us or for any kind of prejudice but it’s safe to keep personal belongings (even in the form of data) off the hands of people who don’t need them.
So private browsing…
screenshot by the author
Doesn’t leave
- Temporary files
- Visited pages
- Cookies
It does leave
- Your IP address
- Trail of traffic to your internet provider
- Network admins can track your online activity
Vpns do help us with hiding our real IP addresses but VPNs don’t…
Photo by Dan Nelson from Pexels
- Wipe internet traffic from our devices
- Delete cookies
- Delete visited pages
Without going too deep we can see which of these protect us from the outside (online) world and the other that does wonders to our computers locally to some extend. If you’re still wondering which one of these is best remember, some people think your question doesn’t really make sense.
Source: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/vpn-and-incognito-comparison-7fe6353564bc