Going incognito

I've been using Chrome as my browser for more than a year now. A few months ago, I found the feature it offers to surf the Web "secretly" via New incognito window (Ctrl+Shift+N). When I opened the window, I first noticed the suspicious-looking man icon on the left hand side (reminds you that no trace of your web browsing will be saved):



The page contained a short explanation of how the incognito works: browsing history and such won't be recorded (basically what's within Chrome) but any external parties might see/take information. Seriously, the last two at the bottom made me laugh:



Anyway, it just goes to say that it's really hard to keep our digital footprints (I prefer calling them cyberprints) hidden. You have the popular story of a man who applied for a job; job employer does a quick search on him and finds a photo of him smoking marijuana. There are also cases of impersonating, hacking, and stalking--which of course includes the infamous Facebook stalking (less suspicious but creepy nonetheless). But in any of these cases there are people and/or computers out there that will eventually look up/stumble on information about us.

I recently read an article about some users on Facebook who don't just simply logout after use--they disable their account. It's obvious that they want to take extra precautions against other [unwanted] people seeing their profiles, but would doing that really ease the problem? With the Internet's concept of information sharing, it's nearly impossible to use it without leaving our own information, whether we like it or not.