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Common misconceptions

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Privacy advice is full of ideas that sound plausible and are wrong, and some are wrong in ways that cost people money or safety. A few come from labels that mislead, such as a padlock icon or a “private” window. Others come from marketing, or from old advice that was sensible once.

This page takes eight of the most common beliefs and gives what the evidence says instead, including where each one has a grain of truth. It doesn’t tell you which tool to buy. To decide what matters for you, see threat modeling. For what you’re most likely to face, see common threats.

At a glance

What people say What the evidence shows
Incognito mode makes me anonymous It stops your browser saving history on your device. Websites and the services they use can still see you
A VPN makes me anonymous and safe A VPN moves trust from your internet provider to the VPN company
The padlock means a site is safe It means the connection is encrypted. More than half of phishing sites had one in 2019
Strong passwords need symbols and regular changes NIST now says length matters most, and complexity rules and forced changes tend to produce predictable passwords
Text-message codes are useless They stopped all bots and 96% of bulk phishing in Google’s study
I’m too unimportant to be targeted Most account attacks are automated and don’t choose targets
Open source is always secure Open code can be subverted, as the xz case showed, and closed code isn’t safer by default
Privacy is dead The outcome still depends on rules and choices

“Incognito mode makes me anonymous”

Incognito mode does one job: it stops your browser saving your history, cookies, site data and form entries on your device. That helps if you share a computer. It doesn’t hide you from the websites you visit, from the advertising and analytics services those sites use, or from your network.

The gap between the name and the behaviour ended up in court. A class action filed in 2020, Brown v. Google, alleged that Google kept tracking people in Incognito mode through its ad technology on third-party sites and left users thinking they had more privacy than they did. In 2024 Google agreed to settle. It would delete or de-identify billions of records, keep blocking third-party cookies by default in Incognito for five years, and change its warning screen to say Incognito doesn’t alter how websites and the services they use, including Google, collect data. The settlement included no payment. Google called the suit meritless and said it never associated the data with individuals.

A “private” label describes what stays on your device. It doesn’t describe what other parties can see.

“A VPN makes me anonymous and safe”

A virtual private network (VPN) sends your traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a company’s server. Your internet provider or a café’s Wi-Fi then sees that you’re using a VPN but not where your traffic goes. Websites see the VPN’s address instead of yours. Those are real benefits in some situations, and the FTC lists public Wi-Fi as one.

The catch is that the VPN company now sees what your internet provider used to see. In 2018 the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned that VPN apps generally don’t make users entirely anonymous, because the app shifts trust from your network to the VPN provider. It added that sites can still tell you’re using a VPN and can still track you through anything you share with them directly, such as an email address typed into a form. The FTC’s advice was to research the app, check its permissions, confirm it encrypts your traffic and see whether it shares information with third parties.

You also can’t check a provider’s “no logs” promise yourself, a point Privacy Guides makes in its VPN guidance. A VPN also won’t stop you typing a password into a fake site. Whether a VPN is worth it depends on the threat you’re facing, and “it makes me anonymous” is never a good reason.

“The padlock means the site is safe”

The padlock shows that the connection between your browser and the site is encrypted using HTTPS. It says nothing about who runs the site or whether they’re honest.

Phishers worked this out years ago. The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) reported that nearly half of phishing sites used HTTPS in the third quarter of 2018, and 58% did by the first quarter of 2019. The group blamed public misunderstanding of the HTTPS label and confusing browser displays, and the FBI issued a public warning in 2019. Certificates that once cost money are now cheap or free, and criminals can also break into legitimate sites and host phishing pages there.

We couldn’t find a current APWG figure, but nothing suggests the share has fallen. Read the domain name in the address bar instead of trusting the icon, and be wary of any link that asks for a password or code.

“Strong passwords need symbols and regular changes”

For years, services demanded a capital letter, a number, a symbol and a new password every 90 days. The US standards body NIST dropped that approach. Its SP 800-63B-4 guidance, finalised in August 2025, bans mandatory composition rules, advises against forcing periodic changes unless a compromise is suspected, and sets a 15-character minimum where a password is the only login step (8 where it’s one part of multi-factor login). It also asks services to accept passwords of at least 64 characters. The reasoning is that complexity rules push people toward predictable patterns, such as capitalising the first letter and adding “1!” at the end.

NIST writes rules for services, not for you, but the logic carries over. A long password is harder to guess than a short, decorated one. The bigger risk is reuse. In Google’s account hijacking study, most attacks came from automated bots trying passwords leaked from other sites. A different password for each site stops that, and most people need a password manager to keep them.

“Text-message codes are useless, so I’ll skip them”

SMS codes do have weaknesses. A scammer who takes over your phone number through a SIM swap receives them instead of you, and a convincing fake login page can collect them. Some people conclude they’re worthless.

Google’s data says otherwise. In its study with New York University and the University of California, San Diego, an SMS code sent to a recovery phone blocked 100% of automated bots, 96% of bulk phishing attacks and 76% of targeted attacks. On-device prompts did better at 100%, 99% and 90%, and no user who relied only on security keys fell victim to targeted phishing. The data covers Google accounts in 2019.

So a text code is a large improvement over a password alone, especially against the mass attacks most people face. If your account offers app prompts or a security key, those are stronger. Common threats explains SIM swaps and when the stronger options matter.

“I’m not important enough to be targeted”

This belief assumes attackers choose victims. Most of them don’t. Google found that most account hijacking attempts came from automated bots running through passwords exposed in other breaches. A bot doesn’t know or care who you are. It only needs your password to match.

Data sellers don’t choose either. In an investigation published in September 2026, Dismislab found sellers in Bangladesh offering national ID copies, call records and phone locations, and often a buyer needed only a mobile number. Being unimportant offers little protection when the tools work at scale.

The grain of truth is that truly targeted attacks do mostly hit people with enemies, such as journalists, activists and executives. For everyone else, the practical risk is being an easy account in a very large pool.

“Open-source software is always secure”

Open-source software is code anyone can read, and that openness can make flaws easier to find. It doesn’t guarantee anyone has looked.

In March 2024 a backdoor was found in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of xz Utils, a compression library included in many Linux systems. It was tracked as CVE-2024-3094 and rated 10 out of 10 for severity. The attacker had spent about two years contributing to the project, earned maintainer status and then hid malicious code in the release files. A Microsoft engineer, Andres Freund, noticed that SSH logins were slower than expected and traced it back before the code reached most stable releases. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert.

The case cuts both ways. Open development let an attacker subvert a trusted project, and open scrutiny caught the attack. Closed-source software isn’t safer by default either. Outsiders can’t read it, but it can be audited and researchers can still find flaws through reverse engineering, as Privacy Guides notes. Licence type doesn’t decide security. A product’s record, maintenance and independent audits do.

“Privacy is dead, so there’s no point”

People often say it’s too late because everything has already leaked. Law professor Neil Richards argues the opposite: privacy isn’t dead but up for grabs, meaning the outcome depends on rules and choices still being made. The Google data above shows that a few ordinary steps stop most mass attacks, and governments keep passing new data protection laws. Why privacy matters makes the longer case.

Sources

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