Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
How Private is Private Browsing?
April 29, 2014
I am sure the guys in my forensics lab are hoping not to receive any more e-mail "homework" from their boss. They have been very patient as I attempt to answer questions from CLE audiences. One recent question was about how effective private browsing is, so I asked my forensics technologists to do some testing.
Their testing included IE, Chrome and Firefox using a unique list of search terms to run in each browser with private browsing enabled. They ran our usual browser history tools across the drive. In the test environment, there was limited recovery of artifacts.
However, as they pointed out to me, previous experience has shown us this is not always the case and they do sometimes recover web history from private browsing sessions. In short, while features like “InPrivate Browsing” (IE), “Incognito Mode” (Chrome) and “Private Browsing” (FireFox) usually leave much less behind than a standard configuration, artifacts are often still recoverable in locations like pagefile.
So it is obviously better to use private browsing than not if you want to protect your privacy, but don't think it is a silver bullet.
If you want to learn more, here is one good article describing Firefox's Private Browser and what can be recovered. It also links to articles with similar information about the other two browsers.
Thanks to Phil DePue and his comrades in the lab for their research. By way of thanks, I declare it Pizza Day today boys!
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