A Study on Private Browsing: Consumer Usage, Knowledge, and Thoughts

February 3, 2017 – 11:53 AM

At DuckDuckGo, our vision is to raise the standard of trust online. To that end, we strive to understand what people know about online privacy and how they use the privacy features available to them. This report focuses on the feature in web browsers commonly referred to as “Private Browsing.”

“Private Browsing,” “Privacy Mode,” “Secret Mode,” or “Incognito Mode” is a system of web browsing that clears browsing history and file cache after use. Despite Private Browsing being one of the most commonly known and used privacy features, we find that most people misunderstand the privacy protections it provides.

Our findings are based on a survey conducted with a random sampling of 5,710 Americans who were asked to share their experiences with Private Browsing.

Source (pdf download):
https://duckduckgo.com/download/Private_Browsing.pdf