Safari’s ‘Private Browsing’ mode is not as private as you think!

We understand how incognito or private browsing modes are such blessings when you want to look up at things that are private or personal (if you know what we mean!). Essentially what the private browsing mode does is that it prevents the Web Browsers from saving your loaded content, thus leaving no trace behind of your search history once you shut the window. Or that is what we believed till now!

Unfortunately, MacIssues recently discovered, that even in the ‘Private Browsing’ mode Mac OS X’s Safari logs all the visited sites and stores the database files at ~/Library/Safari/WebpageIcons.db. This is the location where Safari stores the small associated “favicon” images for the visited sites in the regular browsing mode. However, Safari saves here the favicon images for the sites browsed in the private mode as well.

Though it is no way a security risk, but it does pose many privacy issues. After all, what is the point of browsing in a private tab if it is simply accessible to anyone, as these files can easily be opened using an SQLite reader.

However, MacIssues suggested a few ways you could keep your private search incognito:

Using a different browser: You could download a secondary web browser for private browsing purpose.

Avoid using a shared or public system: Another way of ensuring that such files aren’t retrieved by anyone, you could avoid using a shared system, and use a private and encrypted system instead.

Manually delete all the evidence: Once you are done using the Safari, you could also manually delete all the Webpageicon.dp files that contain all the search information.