Chrome Private Mode Not Quite Private

wiplash writes "Google Chrome appears to store at least some information related to, and including, the sites that you have visited when browsing in Incognito mode. Lewis Thompson outlines a set of steps you can follow to confirm whether you are affected. He has apparently reported this to Google, but no response has yet been received."

Comments

Addicted.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is addicted to your information, and will do whatever they can to get more.

They cannot help themselves.

Resist.

Re:Addicted.

[sopssa]

Yes, it's the basis of their business model. They need all that information to serve their advertisers better. This means they're also constantly looking for new ways to get even more and more information. Even if some of their services currently aren't related to advertising (like their free DNS service), there's no guarantee that they cannot be in the future. They're awfully easy to integrate later when they have grown, and with publicly traded companies you never know what is going to happen in the future. Especially when they're looking for new ways to generate advertising revenue.

Notice that all of their services are related to obtaining information, usage statistics, datamining and serving advertisement. YouTube too is a great resource for advertisers, as soon as online video matures a little bit more (though they're already working on it).

Not that it's a bad business model - but if you value your privacy, you might want to consider forgetting freeloading for a moment and buying software. You know, the business model that is based on customers paying for the software instead of selling their soul for advertisers. Google is the new adware business, they have just hidden it better.

Re:Addicted.

[kdemetter]

"We are the Google , you will indexed " ?

Re:Addicted.

[AnotherUsername]

I was going to reply with comments related to the Constitution(specifically the Bill of Rights), how the court system works, the various court cases the Supreme Court has ruled on regarding protests and freedom of speech, and other facets of how the law protects you from government abuse related to freedom of speech and protest/demonstrations, but then I remembered that this is Slashdot, and the government is always bad, and corporations are always better than the government.

I sometimes forget that I am in the minority around here when it comes to trust of the government vs. trust of corporations(I trust the government more than I trust corporations, though I have a healthy wish for privacy). I am one of those that thinks Orwell is overrated(I like the stories, but I don't see them happening), with Huxley's Brave New World being my dystopian present/future to be feared.

Didn't work for me

[TimHunter]

using 4.1.249.1064 on Win7.

Re:Didn't work for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, seems this only affects the beta versions from their Dev channel.

Man that's evil! Putting bugs in their betas so they can spy on us...

this doesn't happen to me

[yincrash]

tried it in 5.0.375.38 beta. my hypothesis is that he had other incognito windows open as well (probably with porn in them) that kept the incognito session going while he was open and closing the elephants.com window.

all incognito windows share the same session

Persists across restarts, too

[emag]

So, since the example in TFA didn't restart Chrome between incognito windows, I decided to see what happened when I followed the steps with "4.5 Exit chrome completely, then restart", and can confirm that even when Chrome fully exits and is restarted, it remembers the zoom level used in a URL only ever visited in an incognito window.

Reproduced it here just fine

[droopus]

Exactly as reported.

I'm using 5.0.375.29 beta on an Air running 10.6.3 over wifi.

Went to cheese.com (the #1 resource for cheese!) and the zoom held.

Additionally, when I opened a new tab in non-incognito mode, the zoom STILL held, so there is definitely some communication between regular and incognito windows.

I'm devastated that my secret cheese browsing is now public.

Re:Not surprised.

[drinkypoo]

There's always Chromium; I run it on Ubuntu. For Windows there's SRWare Iron. I'm not sure which is the preferred build for OSX; perhaps Crossover Chromium. TFA doesn't say whether Chromium is affected. Some comments under TFA state that the effect lasts only until Chrome is restarted, suggesting that the information is stored only in the memory cache.

The bug

[trazan]

Here's the bug in question, filed about 2 weeks ago:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=43107
Seems like someone looked at it, prioritized and classified it (eg pri-2, internals-cookies).
What's the big deal? It's just a bug that needs to get fixed, not a huge conspiracy by Google.

Re:The bug

[EvolutionsPeak]

Look, we're trying to do some rabble rousing here and you are not helping.

Re:Um no

[Rockoon]

You are kidding, right?

So I jump on your computer and browse to red-hot-midget-porn.net and find that the zoom level isnt the default value...

Do I conclude that (A) you don't like red-hot-midget-porn?, or (B) you do like red-hot-midget-porn?

Well in any case, I'm pretty sure that everyone likes red-hot-midget-porn, so maybe this is a bad example.