Is Secure Browsing as Secure as it’s Cracked up to Be?

For people surfing the Internet, aka: most of us, an increasing concern is the lack of privacy that’s becoming more evident by the day. How many times have you visited a website and saw a banner ad that peddled local dating, with pictures and profiles of potential hopefuls from your exact city? Where privacy is concerned, things like this are a bit scary, but really, they’re only the beginning.

To help give some piece of mind to those surfing online, browser companies like Mozilla, Google and even Microsoft have added “private browsing” features to their respective product. Using this feature means that for the most part, you’re more protected online, and aren’t leaving traces of your browsing all over the place. Yes, you can browse for porn shop online for gifts in peace, and not have to worry about a family member finding out about it.

Or can you? As it seems, these “secure browsing” features might not be that secure after all. Researchers at Stanford University have found that the protections put in place in these browsers was imperfect, and that some didn’t properly isolate the private sessions from the regular sessions. So in essence, if you’re browsing in private mode on one tab, potentially, the other tabs could gather some information about it.

The biggest risk is with browser extensions, though. It seems that on some browsers, using privacy modes don’t disable certain features that extensions can have, so even if you are being protected by the browser itself, these extensions might negate it by keeping information stored away in an easy-to-access manner.

I do believe that we’ll come to a time when these privacy modes are truly secure, but there’s a lot of work to be done, and all things considered, the current implementations are not horrible. Just don’t expect to use them as a bullet-proof solution.

The researchers found that the browsers’ protections were imperfect. Browsers did not properly isolate their private sessions from non-private ones, with the result that suitably crafted sites could trace visitors between private and non-private sessions. Sites could also leave persistent indications that they had been visited, allowing visits to be detected by local users.