Hello everyone,
My question is which browsers "Private Browsing mode" hides information the best? What information does it hide and how can you tell if the Private browsing mode has been used? I have my ideas, would just like to hear other professionals thoughts. I'm asking because I am working on a Samsung phone and they use Chrome and I cant seem to find any naughty website information the person admits they view, using Cellebrite. What does Chromes "Incognito" mode hide? I know Safari doesn't record the date/time. Hope this makes sense. Thank you for your help!
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Incognito mode doesn't really 'hide' anything. All it does is NOT save the browser history.
As stated by the Chrome browser itself:
"Chrome won’t save the following information:
Your browsing history
Cookies and site data
Information entered in forms
"Your activity might still be visible to:
Websites that you visit
Your employer or school
Your Internet service provider"
The Tor Browser (And Brave browser which has a Tor option built in) can also hide your browsing activity from ISP and employer/school as the connections are encrypted tunnels.
I'd guess that any browsers ability to NOT save history would be comparable to any other...
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I'd guess that any browsers ability to NOT save history would be comparable to any other...Â
I would dare to add that any saved browser history can usually be deleted.
jaclaz
In years past testing of specifically IE and Firefox, they were quite different in their privacy modes.
Firefox kept cookies, history, and cache in memory only. Terminated Firefox lost everything.
IE wrote to disk normally and deleted old cookies, history, and cache upon starting a new session. All of the previous session existed on disk up until a new IE session was started. What's more, the new IE session deleted the previous session, it did note wipe it.
What is the make/model/OS version of the smartphone you are investigating?
After exhausting Cellebrite's normal extraction methods, have you attempted to root the phone in order to create a physical image?
A few additional notes
- Since few years (e.g. Chrome since 2018), mobile phone browsers block screenshots and disable saving pages in private/incognito mode, making it unappealing to use. Incognito mode should only disable internal browsing data (e.g. history, cookies), but still allow saving pages independently into the download folder and screenshots.
- Firefox Mobile once had a useful guest mode. It was removed, allegedly to "streamline the experience" (meaningless marketing nonsense).
- Google Chrome (desktop) offers the ability to close all open incognito windows at once.
- As far as I can remember, there was a legacy Firefox add-on (before Firefox Quantum) which allowed clearing browsing data (cookies, local storage, etc.) of the private browsing session while leaving the tabs open. That would be convenient for testing/development purposes.
