How do I hide downloads?

Are my downloads private?

How can I know what people I share my IP address with are downloading?

To help protect your privacy, we have set a private IP (the IP number that identifies you on the Internet) for each download. It is not something you see or do, nor is it used for any purpose other than to allow us to credit your ISP (Internet Service Provider) for that download. The IP address for each download is also removed from your download logs and sent to our servers so that we can accurately track that download. In other words, we never see your IP address nor do we know it at all.

Why would someone download a private browser?

It is not as useful as any other browser.

There's no real reason for people to do this. They don't have any intention of using it, there is no real benefit, and it has security issues.

But you can't deny that they downloaded a different browser than what they're normally running? That's a fairly strange thing to do. They could be using firefox, chromium, or a private "browser", who knows.

I see a lot of people complaining about how stupid the private browser idea is, but I would say that this kind of stuff should be left to the individual, not an EUL or whatnot. So what if some user wants to use a different browser than their main browser? Just leave it to the user to install whatever they want/need/wish/whatever. You don't have to stop anyone from making private browsers, just make the rules that are made regarding the use of those browsers reasonable.

This might have been a bad example of something that can cause problems, but I think you can make a really good argument that these things should never happen. This is an example of something that could easily go both ways: if someone has the idea of using a private browser, they could easily just install a different browser on top of it. You're saying that the private browser doesn't really add any value to the user experience at all, which I find absolutely ridiculous. A better example would be something like a private torrent client, which doesn't really add anything to the user experience.

This has nothing to do with the original question, but if it does, the answer is that Chrome is the most popular browser and the users of it tend to be the most educated. There's also no way to know that people who download private browsers are even browsing at all. Private browsers are a useless idea and shouldn't exist because it's like creating a whole other Internet which, in fact, it is. But, if you disagree and think that everyone should have a private browser, then just give me one.

What you can do is prevent the creation of such private Browsers, either by banning them or not allowing them to exist. For instance, in the case of Ubuntu, you can prevent such things from ever happening by ensuring that all packages are signed by Canonical, so that no one can tamper with the package.