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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

(Off-topic: so The New York Times is no longer available in private mode. How do they detect it?)

Newspapers are perfectly happy to complain about big tech's privacy issues, but are completely fine being beneficiaries of it and don't care about the serious implications of removing one's choice to use private browsing mode.

Exactly. Gizmodo, TechCrunch etc continually run stories about tech doing bad things (which is a good thing) but they are happy to be hypocrites and do those same exact bad things they denounce, as if...

They use the Filesystem api.

There is experimental support to stop this detection in chrome now (74 and later). Go to chrome://flags/ and Enable "Filesystem API in Incognito". It should be on by default in an upcoming version.

Good to know (though I have a subscription to the NYT).

maybe they try to write to local storage? local storage isn't available in private mode, at least incognito in chrome.

Would you be kind enough to educate the rest of us on what you mean? Local storage must exist on some level so that the images/text/etc can be stored to be viewed.

Normal assets like those you list are cached on download. "Local storage" is a bit more like cookies in that the webmaster can store whatever they like there. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Storage...

He's referring to the one of several APIs like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Storage... or those listed on https://www.html5rocks.com/en/features/storage - Allowing the webpage to store some amount of data on your local machine. This storage can be accessed even if you're temporarily offline, so you can have an interactive webpage that downloads some data, and so long as you don't close the page you can update it. When you reconnect (or next load the webpage) your state is stored and can be reconciled with server state.

For obvious reasons, you don't want that API active for private browsing (As persisting it would enable tracking), but by combining browser version detection to determine if a browser supports the API with feature detection to see that it's disabled, you can assume that "Private Browsing" is on.

Better browser API design might include in-memory only support for the API, but I haven't thought that all the way through.

It is if you open it incognito from a SERP.

Re: "how do they detect it?" -- without investigating it, I would suspect browser fingerprinting within a window time slice.

SERP = Search Engine Results Page

For anyone else who didn't know.

This didn't work for me (Brave incognito on a Mac). I have a free subscription through my library, but I do run into the paywall when I search things on my phone in Firefox Focus.

In that case, I just share to Pocket and read there (never a problem, even without an account). I assume they have some sort of deal with Pocket where they share analytics with the publishers in exchange for giving unpaywalled access.

Not sure. Here is a archive.is mirror: http://archive.is/Fhnb3

They don't; The New York Times detects my Safari as being in private mode when it's not.

Open page in Firefox, while page is loading quickly toggle reader(right of address bar) view, before the subscription pop-up shows up. If you miss the short window, refresh page and try again.

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