ChatGPT’s Version Of Incognito Mode May Soon Remember Who You Are

ChatGPT’s Version of Incognito Mode May Soon Remember Who You Are

Last updated: 2026/01/26 at 8:30 AM

News Room Published 26 January 2026

Temporary Chat on ChatGPT may soon be easier to use than ever before.

The feature works similarly to Incognito Mode in Google Chrome or private browsing features in Edge, Firefox, or Safari, creating a session that won’t record your history or affect future recommendations.

ChatGPT’s current version starts afresh, without any of your personalization changes or search history influencing its responses. A new toggle, spotted by AI engineer Tibor Blaho and shared on X, lets you enable the Personalize replies feature in a Temporary Chat. Blaho’s post was first reported by Bleeping Computer.

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The feature doesn’t appear to be available to everyone, with PCMag unable to access it at the time of writing. Blaho refers to it as a “currently hidden option,” but it’s unclear whether Blaho has access as part of a test or whether it was activated through other means.

If you turn the feature’s toggle on, it uses ChatGPT features such as memories, history, and your style and tone preferences in the private results. This lets you get similar responses from ChatGPT without it recording what you’re searching for, which is helpful when you want to prevent your search from affecting its history.

The way the feature currently works means you revert to a basic version of the chatbot in a Temporary Chat, which lacks the personal touch you may have spent years building with OpenAI’s tools.

The brand says it will retain messages for up to 30 days. However, OpenAI says this data isn’t used for training, and it also warns that third-party GPT tools may also keep data for longer.

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OpenAI says, “If the GPT has actions, data sent to third parties through those actions is subject to the recipient’s privacy policy. That means the recipient may keep that data for longer than 30 days and may use it for other purposes.”

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.