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Chrome For Android's Incognito Mode Saves Some of the Sites You Visit
An anonymous reader writes: A newly found bug in Google Chrome for Android means incognito mode really isn't as locked-down as it's designed to be. Some sites you visit while using the privacy feature are still saved, and can be retrieved simply by opening the browser's settings. Google Chrome for Android has had incognito mode since February 2012. Here is Google's official description of the feature: "If you don't want Google Chrome to save a record of what you visit and download, you can browse the web in incognito mode."
"If you don't want Google Chrome to save a record of what you visit and download, you can browse the web in incognito mode. We will inform the NSA of your preference."
GOOGLE'S BROWSER, THE BILLION DOLLAR DARLING OF THE AD "INDUSTRY" HAS A BROWSER THAT COMPROMISES PRIVACY??!?!
I
AM
FUCKING
S H O C K E D
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
A bug one must opt-out of.
They didn't make them. Google wanted to do this. Google is a bunch of CONservative jerks that hate us.
Chrome is a big complex browser with a lot of code. This was probably a true bug and nothing nefarious or devious intended. I would also think the QA for such a feature is probably not a priority and didn't get much testing.
Exactly. The is part of the GOPper grand strategy against human thought. This is something every human has the right to know.
And with Google on their side it is going to be very hard to retain textual information about what life was like before Republicans.
Here is Google's official description of the feature: "If you don't want Google Chrome to save a record of what you visit and download, you can browse the web in incognito mode."
What if I don't want Google to save a record of what I visit and download?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I have no problem when people insult Republicans.
I start to roll my eyes when those same people are 'fans' of Democrats.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If I'm browsing incognito and click links to open in new windows, sometimes I'll look and find I seem to have lost the incognito protection. Not sure if this is by design or not, but regardless it's stupid and deceptive.
Also, incognito or not, Google is sapping your browsing habits and history. Only way to avoid this is to not use android.
Wtf? You get +1 for that partisan bs?
Obama and the Dems have greatly expanded the surveillance state and pissed all over people's privacy rights.
By clicking on the site in question, you are taken to a screen with the details of what was saved for that site. There is a button to Clear and Erase. Press it, and all info for that site is cleared from your history.
The assertion that ESR makes is that when many people look at a bug, for one of them it will be an "easy" bug, someone will see the issue quickly, and it can therefore be fixed quickly. This bug is already fixed, so it supports his assertion.
Compare IE. The bugs in IE handling of "Vary" were well known and documented for FIVE YEARS before it was partially fixed. As another example, for over a decade, servers had to speak http 1.0 to IE and http 1.1 to every other browser because IE's handling of http was so broken. So 5-10 years to fix serious documented a bug in IE, several hours to several days for Chrome.
Any sufficiently advanced malware is indistinguishable from a bug.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why would incognito mode history recording work differently on Android ? Seems strange this code is nt common to all platforms.
How could open sores software contain flaws! Saints Loonix Toreballs and Richard M ToeCheeseEater said open sores software is perfect!
You do know that Chrome is closed source? Yeah, sometimes little details matter...
It's been known that URLs you visit in incognito mode on Android show up in auto-suggest when typing in an URL manually in normal mode as well. Has nobody else noticed this?
The bug you refer to took Google 16 months to fix. That's the measurement being discussed in the famous ESR quote. If Chrome were developed b an open community, Adblock Plus (or anyone else) could have fixed it sooner, rather than waiting for Google to do it.
How many bugs exist is an entirely different question, how soon bugs are noticed is a third question. My experience (20 as a professional developer) suggests that bugs are noticed right away when you have a good automated test suite, and the code is written to be testable.
Bugs are avoided by peer review and highly competent developers, along with a culture of doing it right the first time, rather than doing it sloppy and thinking "we'll fix it later." That culture is can be promoted in several ways. One of the most effective things to motivate me to do excellent work has been knowing that my code would undergo thorough peer review - I don't want to look like an idiot by submitting poor code. Rather, I want to be proud of what I wrote when other people look at it. That's why I instituted peer review at my last two jobs. I learned about the power of peer review, even for veteran programmers, from open source projects where at least two or three other programmers would review my commits before they were integrated. I submitted good code, peer review made it better. So my experience supports an extension of ESR's statement- given enough eyeballs, fewer bugs will make it to release. Dumping closed code an slapping a FOSS license on it won't magically fix it. A open, collaborative development model as used by the Linux kernel, Apache, or Moodle does improve quality.
There is an interesting side note. I said that a culture of doing it right the first time improves quality. A huge mess that's nearly impossible to maintain and debug is created with a culture of "Do whatever seems to kind of work, we'll fix it later" . The latter statement is Agile. Quality code, doing it right the first time is almost the exact opposite of Agile.
Oops, I said "it took Google 16 months to fix." No, that was a Firefox bug. It took the Firefox team about 16 months. So that's an example where OSS wasn't super-fast, though it was much faster than the 5-10 years it sometimes takes to fix known problems in IE.
I was reading about this earlier. The article indicated that the bug exists in Chromium as well. Chromium is open source. Chrome is the closed source variant. This doesn't make the OP any less of an idiot but the bug exists in the open source version as well as far according to the article. I have not, of course, read this particular article. I'm not a heretic.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The Firefox problem I refer to had several components, one of them was a bug that was first reported on Bugzilla in April 2001, and remained unfixed for 14 years despite being in an open source project.
it's because the programmers didn't want to resort to urea injection.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I have Chrome Beta 46 on my Android devices and do not see this problem
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking