Back when I was a tech support rep, I would often receive calls from people [men] who were curious [needed to know before their significant other came home] about how to delete their browser history [how to make the traces of their porn browsing go away].
With the inception of “Private Browsing” or “Incognito” modes in all of the major browsers, I’m sure calls like that don’t happen as often as they used to. However, if you’re using one of these modes for surfing some websites that somebody might frown upon, you may not be as protected as you believe.
A report from Stanford University's Computer Science Security Lab researchers this week reveals that your browsing habits still aren’t completely private.
The study examined Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari browsers to compare the security and anonymity features available in each one. "Current private browsing implementations provide privacy against some local and Web attackers, but can be defeated by determined attackers," researchers concluded.
One of the issues that can thwart attempts to browse the web without leaving tracks is browser add-ons.
Among the most popular add-ons and extensions for Firefox and Chrome, researchers discovered that several stored records on the hard drive despite the browsers being set to private mode. The data could later be recovered by a researcher or anyone who knows what they’re doing.
An add-on has been designed to disable such extensions for private browsing sessions, but even this isn’t foolproof. Additionally, the creators of some of the affected browser plug-ins, including Adobe’s Flash plug-in, have updated their software to better facilitate private browsing.
A good rule-of-thumb is to just assume that none of the content you view online is ever private. Computer data, even that which has been “deleted” is usually more easily recoverable than most people realize.
And the next time you tell a tech support agent that you were using private browsing mode to surf the web but weren’t actually looking at porn, don’t expect them to believe you. The study also confirmed what we all knew anyway: The most common purpose of private browsing is to hide tracks from visiting porn sites.
