Every web browser comes with a private browsing mode to help people browse the web privately. There’re always some reasons for why we choose to browse privately. Sometimes to protect our privacy on shared or borrowed devices, or to exclude certain activities from our browsing histories. But, what when you get to know that the websites you’re browsing privately in a browser are still tracking your activities?
You’ll be shocked to know that there’s an unintended loophole in your Google Chrome web browser that allows website owners to detect the activities of people even in the incognito mode.
Google is Going to Fix This Loophole to Protect Private Browsing
But, in a recent blog post Google said that some sites have been using an unintended loophole to detect people when browsing in Incognito Mode and decided to fix this loophole at the end of the July with the new version that is Chrome 76.
Google clearly mentioned the date of the release of Chrome 76 which is scheduled for July 30. And with this release that unintended loophole will be fixed which allowed websites to detect viewers in the Incognito Mode.
What Actually This Loophole Is? How It Will Affect Publishers?
The website using an unintended loophole to detect Chrome users while in Incognito Mode is actually a FileSystem API Loophole. Chrome’s FileSystem API is generally disabled in Incognito Mode to avoid leaving traces of activity on someone’s device.
But, some websites are using this FileSystem API to detect users in the way that they check for the avaivility of the API and if the an error message is received, they determine that a private session is occurring and give the user a different experience.
And this is because the websites using this FileSystem API will be affected on closing this FileSystem API Loophole in Google Chrome’s version 76.
So, if you’re one of the webmasters who use FileSystem API to intercept Incognito Mode sessions and force people to log in or switch to normal browsing mode, monitor the effect of API change after the release of Chrome 76 because the behavior may be different than expected.
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