People have complicated feelings about porn, but it’s undeniable that a lot of people are watching it. According to Pornhub’s 2018 Year in Review, the site had 33.5 billion visits in 2018, which is an increase of 5 billion over the previous year.

“That equates to a daily average of 92 million visitors and at the time of this writing, Pornhub’s daily visits now exceed 100 million,” Porhub writes. “To put that into perspective, that’s as if the combined populations of Canada, Poland and Australia all visited Pornhub every day!”

So, regardless of personal feelings about porn, people are watching it. But that doesn’t mean that they want other people to know that they’re watching it. Many choose to cover up their adult entertainment consumption — and they believe that’s blocking everyone from seeing what they’re viewing. The most common way to do this is through “incognito mode” or “private browser mode.”

And those modes certainly provide some privacy! Unlike a regular browser, private browsing deletes cookies and history from the device that adult entertainment is being viewed on. So if a person wants to hide their porn viewing from a spouse or a child or a roommate who uses the same devices, then private browsing is the way to go. (Although it is important to note that if a browser asks a person to log in while you’re in incognito mode, then it starts recording cookies and history again.)

But if a person wants to hide their adult entertainment viewing from anyone else — be it their Internet Service Provider (ISP), the NSA, websites that are tracking for advertising purposes, or their boss — then private browsing mode isn’t going to help. At all. It only blocks snooping from people who have physical access to a device, but does nothing to block people or organizations who are keeping an eye on what people are doing from a network perspective.

So what’s a person who wants to peruse adult content without anyone watching to do? Their best bet is to install a Virtual Private Network or VPN. A VPN creates and encrypted “tunnel” that all internet traffic on that device travels through. With a good VPN, no one — not even the NSA — should be able to see what a person is viewing in the privacy of their own home.

It seem like VPNs are a good call! But users need to beware, because you get what you pay for with VPNs. Lower quality VPNs — including ones that are offered for “free” — have been known to track and sell user activity, which kind of defeats the purpose of a VPN. The Tenta browser, on the other hand, is not only completely encrypted as soon as it’s open, but also comes in with a built-in VPN that mimics a regular connection to any outside observers. It’s one extra step for user privacy, because most VPNs are observable as VPNs, even if snoopers can’t see what’s going on inside them.

Long story short? Private browsing is fine if a person is only trying to hide their adult entertainment consumption from people in their immediate area. But for anyone else? At the least, get a good VPN. And at the best, get Tenta.