Does Incognito Mode Hide Your IP Address?
In a 2018 study by researchers at the University of Chicago and Leibniz University of Hannover, about a quarter of the 460 participants said they believed private browsing hid their IP address from the sites they visited. It doesn’t. That gap between what people assume and what the feature actually does is exactly why incognito mode keeps getting mistaken for a privacy tool it was never built to be.
What incognito mode actually does
Incognito, Private Browsing, InPrivate — different browsers, same idea: a session that doesn’t get written to your device’s permanent record.
What it clears when you close the window: browsing history, cookies set during that session, cached files, and anything you typed into forms. It also opens a separate, temporary cookie jar, so a site can’t automatically tell you’re the same person who was just logged into another account in a regular tab.
That’s the entire feature. It’s local housekeeping, not a shield between you and the internet.
What it does not touch — including your IP address
Your IP address isn’t something your browser owns. It’s assigned by your ISP or network the moment your device connects, and it’s attached to every packet your device sends — a layer below anything a browser mode can reach.
| Exposed to | Regular tab | Incognito tab |
|---|---|---|
| Your IP address | Visible | Still visible |
| Your ISP (sees connections and DNS lookups) | Visible | Still visible |
| Network admin (office/school Wi-Fi) | Visible | Still visible |
| The websites you visit | Visible | Still visible |
| Browsing history saved on your device | Yes | No |
| Cookies after you close the window | Kept | Deleted |
Why your IP stays visible
A browser mode operates inside the application layer — it can decide what gets saved to disk. Your IP address is handled several layers below that, by your operating system’s network stack talking to your router and, beyond it, your ISP. Incognito mode has no hooks into that layer at all, by design — it was never meant to.
Quick check: open an IP-lookup page in a normal tab, then open the same page in an incognito tab. Same IP address both times. That’s the whole experiment.
The Google Incognito lawsuit: proof it doesn’t mean invisible
This isn’t just a technical footnote — it played out in court. A 2020 class-action lawsuit accused Google of collecting data on users’ activity even while they browsed in Incognito mode. The case settled, with Google agreeing to delete a large volume of records tied to private-browsing sessions, rewrite the disclosure shown on the Incognito splash screen, and keep blocking third-party cookies by default for five years. The lawsuit’s core argument was simple: incognito mode never stopped Google, ISPs, or the sites themselves from seeing what a user did — it only stopped that history from staying on the user’s own device. Read more about how RunVPN treats your data on our trust page.
What incognito mode is actually good for
It’s not useless — it’s just narrower than its name suggests:
- Shopping for a gift on a shared family computer without it showing up in someone else’s autofill or search suggestions
- Logging into a second account without signing out of the first
- Checking how a page looks to a first-time visitor, past a paywall counter or personalized pricing
- Comparing search results without your saved history skewing what shows up
What actually hides your IP address
If the goal is genuinely keeping your IP address off a site’s server logs, you need something that operates at the network layer, not the browser layer. That’s what a VPN does:
- Your device opens an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server
- The VPN server makes requests to websites on your behalf
- Sites only ever see the server’s IP address, never the one your ISP assigned you
- Your ISP sees encrypted traffic headed to that server — not which sites you’re actually visiting
Under the hood, RunVPN runs on AmneziaWG and VLESS-Reality (XTLS-Vision) on the Xray engine, tuned for speed and a stable connection even on networks that interfere with regular VPN traffic. You don’t configure any of that — sign in and the app connects. Read more about the protocol behind it on our VLESS-Reality page.
FAQ
Does incognito mode protect me on public Wi-Fi? No. It doesn’t encrypt your traffic, so anyone else on that network can still potentially intercept what you’re sending, exactly as in a regular tab.
Can my employer or school still see what I do in incognito mode? Yes, if you’re on their network. Network administrators log traffic at the router or firewall level — a layer incognito mode has no access to.
Does closing an incognito window delete everything permanently? It deletes the local traces on your device: history, cookies, cache. It doesn’t reach logs already recorded by your ISP, your network, or the sites you visited.
Is running a VPN overkill for everyday browsing? Not really — once it’s set up, it runs quietly in the background. The bigger risk is the opposite: no encryption at all on a network you don’t control, like café or airport Wi-Fi.
Your IP address is visible in every tab, incognito or not — get RunVPN and change that.