This Bug Makes Chrome’s Incognito Mode Not-So-Private Anymore

Want some privacy while browsing the web, at least from people you might share a computer with? Browsers like Google’s Chrome comes with an Incognito Mode which is supposed to help you with that. However it turns out that maybe Incognito Mode might not necessarily be so private after all, as discovered by one user (via The Next Web), Evan Andersen.

According to Andersen, he claims he was on his computer and was about to play Diablo 3, but instead he was greeted by a porn website that he was browsing hours ago which was supposedly in Incognito Mode. Apparently this was due to a bug in which Andersen claims is with NVIDIA’s GPU drivers where video memory does not get cleared.

However, we should point out that this only seems to affect OS X devices, or, at least, that’s what NVIDIA is claiming in a statement made to The Next Web where they said, “This issue is related to memory management in the Apple OS, not NVIDIA graphics drivers. The NVIDIA driver adheres to policies set by the operating system and our driver is working as expected. We have not seen this issue on Windows, where all application-specific data is cleared before memory is released to other applications.”

Andersen also claims to have submitted this problem to both NVIDIA and Google years ago, but as of January 2016, nothing has been fixed. In fact, he claims that Google has mentioned that they won’t fix it because apparently Incognito Mode is not meant to protect you against other users on the same computer.

That being said, Andersen thinks he might have come up with an idea to fix the issue. “It’s a fairly easy bug to fix. A patch to the GPU drivers could ensure that buffers are always erased before giving them to the application. It’s what an operating system does with the CPU RAM, and it makes sense to use the same rules with a GPU. Additionally, Google Chrome could erase their GPU resources before quitting.” No word on when this will be addressed, but Mac users with NVIDIA GPUs might want to be careful with what you browse in Incognito Mode, lest you end up in an embarrassing/compromising situation.

Filed in Computers >Web. Read more about Chrome, Google, OS X and Privacy.