A new update for Chrome for iOS adds iOS 7 support, but there's also a big flaw as discovered by UK development and design firm Parallax. It turns out that when you use the search/address bar in Incognito mode in Chrome, that history will show up when you return to standard browsing in Google's mobile website search bar.
The Parallax team has provided a look at this in action via a simple video walkthrough of the behaviour, and TechCrunch was able to replicate this with our own devices. Note that if you try to search from the combined address/URL bar in non-Incognito mode, you won't see your search history from when you were browsing in private - you need to navigate to Google.com (or Google.co.uk, etc.) in order to see the history of terms you looked up while supposedly keeping your data and history off the books.
The implications are obvious here, as this is a big gap in a feature designed to give users a way of browsing secure in the knowledge that any information they've looked up will be limited only to that specific session. If you're sharing a device and don't want the other person you're sharing with to be able to follow your search history breadcrumbs, this pretty much throws any sense of privacy you may have had out the window.
We've reached out to Google to find out if they're aware of this bug, and if they're doing anything to fix it, and will update if we hear back.
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world's information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company's extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google's highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
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news by October 03, 2013 at 07:50PM
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