![]() ![]() This overestimation reaches far Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once stated, “If you're concerned, for whatever reason, you do not wish to be tracked by federal and state authorities, my strong recommendation is to use incognito mode, and that's what people do” . Furthermore, implementations are imperfect, often leaving some traces of local activity .ĭespite the limited protections private modes provide, some users overestimate these protections . While browser cookies do not persist across private browsing sessions, this is a minor barrier to tracking by third-party advertising and analytics companies, who can employ more sophisticated fingerprinting techniques . For example, private mode does not aim to prevent tracking over the network. While these private modes aim not to save user data locally, many threats to privacy are outside their scope. Private modes thus help users hide browsing sessions from people sharing a device with them. Unwanted information from the user's browsing history will not appear in the history bar, auto-filled forms, or search suggestions. Furthermore, participants who saw certain disclosures were more likely to have misconceptions about private browsing's impact on targeted advertising, the persistence of lists of downloaded files, and tracking by ISPs, employers, and governments.Įach of the five web browsers widely used today - Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and Opera - offers a private mode that stops storing browsing history and caching data across sessions. These misconceptions included beliefs that private browsing mode would prevent geolocation, advertisements, viruses, and tracking by both the websites visited and the network provider. We found that browsers’ disclosures fail to correct the majority of the misconceptions we tested. Based on the disclosure they saw, participants answered questions about what would happen in twenty browsing scenarios capturing previously documented misconceptions. In a 460-participant online study, each participant saw one of 13 different disclosures (the desktop and mobile disclosures of six popular browsers, plus a control). In this paper, we focus on browsers’ disclosures, or their in-browser explanations of private browsing mode. Many factors likely contribute to these misconceptions. Unfortunately, users have misconceptions about what this mode does. All major web browsers include a private browsing mode that does not store browsing history, cookies, or temporary files across browsing sessions. ![]()
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