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Private browsing (also known as incognito mode or private mode) is a feature in most Web browser that enhances user privacy. In this mode, the browser initiates a temporary session separate from its main session and user data. The browsing history is not recorded, and local data related to the session, like HTTP cookie and Web cache, are deleted once the session ends. The primary purpose of these modes is to ensure that data and history from a specific browsing session do not remain on the device or get accessed by another user of the same device. In web development, it can be used to quickly test displaying pages as they appear to first-time visitors.
Private browsing modes do not necessarily protect users from being Web tracking by other websites or their Internet service provider (ISP). Furthermore, there is a possibility that identifiable traces of activity could be leaked from private browsing sessions by means of the operating system, security flaws in the browser, or via malicious browser extensions, and it has been found that certain HTML5 can be used to detect the presence of private browsing modes due to differences in behavior. This is usually why some people mistake private browsing for a virtual private network.
In a survey conducted by DuckDuckGo, 48% of participants chose not to respond, prompting lead researcher Elie Bursztein to observe, "Surveys are clearly not the best approach to understand why people use private browsing mode due to the embarrassment factor." Additionally, 18% of respondents indicated that their main use of private browsing modes was for online shopping.
A study by the Mozilla Foundation found that most sessions lasted only about 10 minutes. However, there were periods of increased activation, usually from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., at 5 p.m., between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., and a minor peak occurred about an hour or two after midnight.
| Safari 2.0 | Private Browsing (Command⌘+Shift+n) | |
| Google Chrome | Incognito (Ctrl+Shift+n or ⌘+Shift+n for Mac) | |
| Internet Explorer 8 | InPrivate Browsing (Ctrl+Shift+p or ⌘+Shift+p for Mac) | |
| Mozilla Firefox 3.5 | Private Browsing (Ctrl+Shift+p or ⌘+Shift+p for Mac) | |
| Opera 10.50 | Private Tab / Private Window (Ctrl+Shift+n or ⌘+Shift+n for Mac) | |
| Amazon Silk | Private Browsing (Swipe from the left edge of the screen, and then tap Settings and select Enter Private Browsing) | |
| Microsoft Edge | InPrivate Browsing (Ctrl+Shift+n or ⌘+Shift+p for Mac) | |
| Brave | Private Browsing (Ctrl+Shift+n or ⌘+Shift+n for Mac) |
researchers published the results of a project where they applied forensic techniques (namely the Foremost data carving tool and Strings program) to extract information about the users browsing activities on Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers with their private mode enabled. They were able to collect enough data to identify pages visited and even partially reconstruct them.R. Ruiz, F. P. Amatte, K. J. B. Park, Tornando Pública a Navegação "In Private". Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Forensic Computer Science – ICoFCS 2012, Available online Sep 2012. This research was later extended to include the Chrome and Safari browsers. The gathered data proved that the browsers' private mode implementations are not able to fully hide users' browsing activities and that browsers in private mode leave traces of activities in caching structures and files related to the paging process of the operating system.R. Ruiz, F. P. Amatte, K. J. B. Park, Opening the "Private Browsing" Data – Acquiring Evidence of Browsing Activities. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Security and Cyber Forensics (InfoSec2014), Available online Oct 2014.
Another independent security analysis, performed by a group of researchers at Newcastle University, reported a range of potential security vulnerabilities in the implementation of the private modes across Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, including that;
Bugs and security vulnerabilities in extensions themselves may also leak personally identifiable data from private mode.B. Zhao, P. Liu, Private Browsing Mode Not Really That Private: Dealing with Privacy Breaches Caused by Browser Extensions. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2015), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Available online June 2015.
Implementations of the HTML5 FileSystem API can be used to detect users in private mode. In Google Chrome, the FileSystem API was not available in Incognito mode prior to version 76. To prevent circumvention of paywall policies and evasion of web tracking scripts used to monetize traffic, a number of websites — including The New York Times — have used such behavior to block access to users in private browsing mode, and requiring them to subscribe or log in. Chrome 76 allows the FileSystem API to be used in Incognito mode; explaining the change, Google argued that the ability to detect the use of Incognito mode infringes on users' privacy. However, it was later discovered that the disk space quotas for the API differed between normal and Incognito modes, providing another means by which to detect Incognito users. Despite statements otherwise by Google, this has not yet been patched. Scripts have also been developed to detect private browsing mode on other browsers, such as Firefox.
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