Bloomberg Joins The New York Times in Detecting Chrome's Incognito Mode

15 points by sawaruna 6y ago ↗ HN

see: https://i.imgur.com/MSGQbIm.png

In August some (e.g. [1],[2]) were writing about sites detecting private browsing, specifically the NYT, in order to block people who were using Incognito mode in Chrome to get around free article limits. Looks like Bloomberg now has this feature active as well.

[1] https://9to5google.com/2019/08/09/new-york-times-detect-incognito-chrome-76/

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-incognito-mode-can-still-be-detected-by-these-methods/

9 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 32.2 ms ] thread

wallacoloo 6y ago ↗

Not just Chrome: they do the same thing if you're using Firefox Focus on mobile (which probably means they block Firefox Private Browsing on desktop, too).

MrMember 6y ago ↗

I just checked and they detect private browsing in mobile Firefox so I assume the same is true for desktop.

TheChaplain 6y ago ↗

Firefox containers is the solution, especially with this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

What it does is create a new container every time you visit the specified site.

*Edit: Spelling.

rasz 6y ago ↗

There must be a Chrome version of this extension, its trivial to implement (shim all the storage APIs to delete data on page close).

savanaly 6y ago ↗

For those who don't know, you can get around their incognito detection. Go to chrome://flags/ and set "Filesystem API in Incognito" to enabled.

carrutstick 6y ago ↗

Doesn't work for me, unfortunately :-/

tim_evans101 6y ago ↗

Didn't work for me. But hitting the Escape key once main content had loaded and before Icognito warning initiated did.

jaredsohn 6y ago ↗

chrome profiles is another solution for this

ekafasco 6y ago ↗

brave private mode is still undetected