Temporary Chat keeps a conversation out of your history and memory in ChatGPT. Docognito handles a separate job, keeping the screen itself from reading as a chatbot at all. OpenAI still keeps the conversation on its servers for about thirty days.
What Temporary Chat actually removes
Temporary Chat is a setting you turn on before a conversation, and its effect is narrow and specific. A conversation held in Temporary Chat does not appear in your sidebar afterwards, and it is not written into ChatGPT's memory the way an ordinary conversation can be. Once you close it or start a new chat without the setting on, there is no entry in your history to scroll back to and reopen.
That is the entire scope of the change. The conversation still happens on OpenAI's servers in the same way an ordinary one does, and OpenAI still receives everything you type and everything ChatGPT replies with. Temporary Chat governs what is kept on your side of the account, your visible history and your memory, not what OpenAI itself does with the underlying data.
How to turn it on
Start a new conversation
Temporary Chat applies going forward from the point you turn it on, so begin from a fresh chat rather than an existing one.
Toggle Temporary Chat
Find the toggle in the chat controls near the top of the screen, in the same area used to switch between models.
Have the conversation as normal
Everything about typing, sending and reading a reply works exactly as it does in an ordinary chat. Only what happens afterwards is different.
The setting is per conversation, not account wide. Starting a new chat without turning it on again returns you to ordinary behaviour, so it needs to be switched on each time you want it, rather than set once and forgotten. The toggle sits in the same place on the mobile app as it does on the web, so the steps above apply whichever version of ChatGPT you happen to be using at the time.
What it does to memory, in both directions
Memory works asymmetrically around Temporary Chat. A temporary conversation is not written into memory once it ends, so nothing you say inside one adds to what ChatGPT remembers about you going forward. It is not, however, isolated from memory that already exists. If earlier, ordinary conversations have added details to memory, ChatGPT can still use those details while responding inside a temporary conversation, since memory is read the same way regardless of which mode the current chat is in. Temporary Chat only closes the door on new entries, not on ones already there.
What OpenAI still retains, and for how long
the conversation itself, which OpenAI and Anthropic still receive and store, and Temporary Chat does not change that. OpenAI's own published description states that a temporary conversation is generally kept for around thirty days, primarily to allow for safety monitoring and abuse review, before it is removed from active systems, subject to any legal retention requirements that might apply separately. That is a materially different position from believing the conversation was never stored at all, and the distinction matters if the reason you reached for Temporary Chat was to avoid any record existing anywhere. Nothing about Temporary Chat is unique to the free plan either. A Plus account behaves the same way, since the feature governs where a conversation goes once it leaves your screen, not which subscription you are paying for.
Docognito does not create a temporary or no history mode itself
Turning a conversation into a Temporary Chat is a setting inside ChatGPT, and Docognito has no effect on it in either direction. It changes what someone sees on your screen while you talk to ChatGPT, in a Temporary Chat or an ordinary one, and nothing about what OpenAI stores.
How it differs from deleting a chat afterwards
Deleting an ordinary conversation removes it from your visible history, but only after the fact. Between the moment it started and the moment you deleted it, that conversation existed as a normal chat the whole time, eligible for whatever retention and, unless training was turned off separately, whatever training an ordinary conversation is eligible for. Temporary Chat sidesteps that window entirely, by keeping the conversation out of memory and your sidebar from the start rather than removing it after the fact. If the goal is avoiding memory and history altogether, starting with Temporary Chat achieves more than deleting a chat once it is finished.
What Temporary Chat hides, and what it leaves on screen
Keeping a conversation out of your own history and memory means turning on Temporary Chat before you start typing, and remembering that it resets each time you open a new chat. If your goal is stopping the page itself from reading as ChatGPT to somebody glancing at your screen, that is a separate job, covered by what incognito chat hides in Claude, and what it still stores on the Claude side and by Docognito's own disguise on this one, and neither job substitutes for the other.