What discreet mode actually does
The threat is not an ad agency. The threat is a brother who picks up your phone. So the site writes nothing to your device until you say it may — and that is also why there is no consent banner here.
Most sites treat privacy as a question about who is collecting data on you. Here the question is a different one, and it is much closer to home.
The threat is not an ad agency in another country. It is a brother who picks up your phone while you are in the shower. A partner who knows the passcode. A parent who “just wanted to check something”. Against that person, localStorage and a cache full of pages named /hiv are not privacy footnotes — they are the evidence.
So nothing is stored by default
Discreet mode is on until you switch it off yourself. While it is on, everything the site wants to remember — the note you are typing, whether you chose dark mode — lives in the tab’s own memory and dies when you close it. It never touches the disk.
Switching it off is one tap and stores a single flag. That flag is the only thing that can ever be written first; everything else is written because it is already there.
Three things then open up:
- The notes in your thank-you box are waiting for you next time.
- The site remembers whether you chose dark or light.
- The emergency pages open with no internet at all.
Switching it back on wipes the device but not the tab: what is on screen stays until you close it. That is deliberate. Someone reaching for this switch because a door just opened should not also lose what they were writing.
And that is why there is no consent banner
Not because we found a loophole. Because there is nothing to consent to: until you touch the switch, nothing is stored. No cookies. No account. And no third party to ask consent for — the site’s own security policy forbids the browser from making a request to any outside address, even if somebody later adds code that tries.
The search works the same way. The index is one static file, fetched once; what you type into the box goes nowhere, never enters the page’s address, and is not left in your browser history. Closing the search clears the field — so the next person to open this laptop cannot see what the last one was looking for.
And one honest limit
The quick exit replaces the page and clears this tab’s history. It cannot wipe your whole browser history — nothing running inside a page can. The privacy page says so, rather than pretending otherwise.
Better to know exactly how far it goes than to rely on something that does not exist.