We have heard that the best way to anonymously browse the internet is with the help of Incognito mode. Now, many browsers these days provide the feature of incognito mode inside them. This includes the like of Google Chrome, Firefox and all other Chromium-based browsers. However, there was a report recently claiming that website owners are taking advantage of a loophole in Google Chrome.
This loophole would allow them to see if someone is browsing from incognito mode on Google Chrome. If that’s the case, there would be a special session or script for those users which will be shown. It should be noted that the users were not being traced but only the fact that they are browsing from incognito mode was able to be known.
Now, this obviously goes against the policies of incognito mode and it also goes against Google’s policy. Therefore, once Google found out about this loophole, it was patched immediately. But the fact that this loophole was patched created a problem for the websites which have a paywall. For example, there are websites which allow you to see an article a day or 5 articles per week and then you need to subscribe. Most of these websites used to track users with the help of this loophole.
Since that bug has now been patched, it has become a tedious task for website owners to track users browsing privately. However, that is not to say that it is now impossible to track them. A researcher named Vikas Mishra has studied that Google allocates a temporary storage quota for browser sessions in an incognito mode which is not the case in non-incognito mode.
This limit is set to just 120MB whereas there is no such limit in non-incognito sessions. Therefore, if quota allocated to the browser’s filesystem and is 120MB or less then it has to be in incognito mode.