'Porn mode' not necessarily anonymous | Hacker News Reader

'Porn mode' not necessarily anonymous

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6 pointshackhead5 comments

"[T]he paper concludes that "current private browsing implementations provide privacy against some local and Web attackers, but can be defeated by determined attackers."

This doesn't live up to the earlier claim that "The private browsing options provided by the four major Web browser publishers aren't as anonymous and secure as most users might think." What most users think about porn mode is that they can surf for porn (or birthday gifts, for that matter) without their significant other (or children) finding traces the browser history. If that's the case, most users are getting what they want. (People who are worried about TOR are a whole different category.)

One of my bigger uses for private browsing is online banking, and I think it's a use that a lot of people would benefit from taking.

Sort of like hashing the entries in your .ssh/known_hosts, it's better that someone who has access to your laptop not know where you bank.

And for extra security I tend to use private mode in a secondary browser.

Wha…? I always assumed (and assumed that everyone else also assumed) that private browsing’s sole purpose is in me being able to hand my laptop to anyone I want without having to worry about my browser history. Nothing more.

I'm not as familiar with the Firefox extensions, but in Chrome all extensions are turned off by default in incognito mode -- only those extensions that you've explicitly enabled will be active in incognito mode. Furthermore, the docs for Chrome explicitly encourage developers to have their extensions whether the browser is running in incognito mode, and adapt appropriately.[1] So it seems likely a few of the top extensions using the various storage mechanisms (localStorage or otherwise) are already doing the right thing; it would be interesting to see an analysis of this, however.

[1] http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/overview.html...

They really should have covered Opera if it was the only one without extensions, but I don't know how much effort it would have taken, I hope it wasn't out of laziness.

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