Skip to main content

Security Tips - Incognito Window

A lot of people know what incognito mode (or private mode) is at some basic level. They should use it when they want to do something "private" on the web. But I think most people don't actually understand what it means and how/why to use it. Perhaps this will help.

Before we start - cookies are little bits of data used to track you between page loads. Think of it like a fingerprint. They're extremely important for session handling, so that a site can remember who you are from one page to the next. But they're also really handy for things like advertising services to track your activity on the web.

When you open a new incognito window (and don't have one open already) - you're starting a new session in your web browser that doesn't have any of the cookies or caching that your "normal" browser window has. In practical terms, this means that when you visit a site, they won't have any history of you (mostly) and you may need to relogin, etc. And when you close an existing incognito window, all cookies associated with that window are also lost. Things like history are also not tracked in incognito.

Many people think of the incognito mode as "porn" mode - but I'd argue that it should be the most that we do most of our browsing in. This is because it makes it much harder for sites to track you - and there are many, many sites and systems that can track your activity across many, many different sites now.

Ever search for a product of some sort, only to start getting emails and ads around that target all over the place? That's the advertising network (probably google) tracking you. They're always building up a profile of your interests, tastes, habits, etc. Personally, that's annoying enough. But, this is also data that they can sell to other parties. While you may trust google with your data... how about anyone they sell that data too? What if it's hacked?

The other thing to remember is that cookies, etc are still tracked within one incognito window "session" - so, just closing the tab in an incognite window isn't enough to clear cookies/history for that tab. You have to close all the tabs in that window - and not have any other incognito windows open.

Incognito is also really helpful when you're developing a site. You can have your "normal" window logged into the system, and use your incognito window to test things like user login, etc - things that would be more complicated when you're trying to use just a "normal" window - as the cookies would conflic.

My general rule is that I use "normal" browser windows only for things I really have to be logged into constantly - for example email. Or things that I control (i.e. sites I developed myself). Pretty much everything else happens in an incognite window that I close pretty much once a day at least.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Using FIle FIlters in FileZilla

Here's a handy tip for situations when you want to download a large number of files - but only of a certain type. For example, perhaps you want to download all the PHP files from a largish website, scattered through many subdirectories. Perhaps you're making a backup and don't want any image files, etc. FileZilla (still the best FTP in my opinion) has a handy feature called filename filters - located under the Edit menu. Here you can set various filters that filter out files based on their filename. Took me a minute to figure that out - you're saying show only PHP files, rather you're saying filter out files that do not have ".php" as their suffix. For some reason, that seems a little backwards to me, but whatever. It works quite well. You can also check whether the filter applies only to files, only to directories - or both. In this example, you'd want to check only files, as otherwise you won't see any directories unless they happen to end in...

Great google article

Over on Maximum PC - there were a few things I didn't know you could do with the various Google apps. One is uploading files to google docs - any file. Which ties in well with my previous post about storing passwords - I uploaded a copy of my password safe file to google docs as a backup. Can't hurt, right? Also, I wasn't aware that you could set up forms in google docs that act as surveys, and then store the results in a google docs spreadsheet. This is a little alarming, as a decent amount of my work involves coding up custom surveys similar to this...

Cleaning content from OpenOffice using Perl

Open office is great software for a number of things - I use it as my office software instead of paying a premium for Microsoft office. But one thing it's not so hot at is converting documents to clean HTML. And one of the main things I use it for is adding content to sites that clients send me in word files or excel spreadsheets. Of course, you can always cut and paste, but that loses a lot of formatting. For example, if the content uses a lot of italics, bold text, etc. it can be a huge pain to go back and put all that back in. Another common situation is a client sending some sort of tablular data in a spreadsheet - for example a list of events. It's the kind of data that can change a lot, and it also needs to be in a table with some decent formatting to be usable. Doing it manually is a lot of grunt work. But grunt work is what computers excel at, and I'm not very good at. So I've developed a number of perl scripts to help streamline this kind of job. I'll go ...