Last Updated on May 14, 2025
While most people are online every day, few understand the technology necessary to enable our phones and computers to access the internet. To be fair, you don’t normally need to know how a piece of technology works to reap its benefits. However, if you search with a private browser because you’re hoping to keep your data safe from the police, FBI, or other government agencies, you may be overestimating the level of protection afforded by browsers such as Chrome’s Incognito Mode or DuckDuckGo.
What are the Benefits of a Private Browser?
Using Incognito or Privacy mode on your browser ensures that your personal data, such as your search history, cookies, passwords, site data, etc., is not tracked. Closing the window will erase everything generated during your browsing session, including history, cookies, and cache. By searching this way, you can ensure that when you end your session, anyone else using the computer cannot access your accounts or see what websites you visited.
What Can’t Incognito Mode Do?
There is a common misconception that private browsing can help protect you from police investigators. But while browsing privately will keep your search history off your device, it won’t hide your IP address from your Internet Search Provider (ISP). So whether you’re looking up information on committing a crime like “how to hide a dead body,” trying to download child porn, or planning a crime with someone using an online messenger service, Incognito Mode or the DuckDuckGo Browser will not hide your activities from the law.
Because your ISP still has records of what sites you visited using your IP address, the police must only secure a warrant to view what pages have been accessed from your IP. Although an IP address alone will not provide enough evidence for someone to be convicted, it does help officers to kickstart their investigation.
Additionally, anything you do while logged into Google or Facebook is recorded on these sites, so if you look things up or have conversations on YouTube, Facebook, or GMail while logged in, this information is saved and can be accessed by investigators as long as they have a search warrant. Similarly, if you download anything onto your computer or cellphone, investigators can access this information once they have obtained a warrant to search these devices.
What’s the Difference Between a Private and Anonymous Browser?
Unlike a private browser, an anonymous browser relies on The Onion Router (Tor), a Proxy server, or a Virtual Private Network (VPR) technologies to hide your IP address from your ISP while you are online. So does a VPN protect you from government surveillance? Yes. A VPN, Proxy, or Tor service can hide your activities from government agencies, hackers, ISPs, and more.
As for which browser is most private, Tor is considered the most secure as it uses a random route of relays each time, making it even harder to track you since the service uses a different connection every time you search online.
But even with these more secure options, you’ll need to refrain from using any site while logged in and avoid downloading anything that could be used as evidence against you. To maximize your level of privacy, use a private search engine like DuckDuckGo.
Nothing Can Protect Your Privacy 100 Percent
Unfortunately, even using the optimal privacy methods is often not enough to protect someone from the long arm of the law. Police departments have computer experts that can often retrace deleted data from websites, cell phones, and computers.
One of the most common ways for people to be caught even when they took steps to use a Tor service is that the police can still uncover conversations they had with others who did not take these steps to protect their data. If investigators can recover your messages, they can then be used against you.
Be Cautious When Deleting Potential Evidence
Surprisingly, deleting data solely to prevent it from being used against you can be considered destroying evidence, even if you just deleted some emails or your browser history. You can be charged with destroying evidence even if the evidence proves you didn’t even commit a crime as long as prosecutors can show you deleted the information because you thought it was evidence. On the other hand, if you routinely delete emails and your browser history (every week, for example), your defense attorney can argue that you delete this information not to hide evidence but because you are wary of hackers, malware, and other online dangers.
Rather than deleting evidence, speak with a computer crimes attorney as soon as you suspect you are being investigated for a crime. Your lawyer may be able to protect you from unreasonable search and seizures or have illegally obtained evidence suppressed.
If your computer or phone contains data that could implicate you in a crime, contact a lawyer as soon as possible to discuss your situation. You can schedule a free initial consultation with Peter M. Liss by calling (760) 643-4050 or (858) 486-3024.
