Browser: domain-specific private mode

asked 2015-05-03 17:48:45 +0300

tokaru gravatar image

Many people like the comfort of cookies, e.g. remaining signed in with a regularly used website. At the same time a lot of people hate cookies for being used to track them across sites by third party snippets, e.g. from Google, Facebook, etc.

So, would it be possible to add a domain-specific private browsing mode? It could work like this:

Whenever there's a new domain in the "address bar" (no matter whether changed manually or automatically), a new private browsing session is created. Other than private browsing mode, these sessions are persisted though. Subsequent visits to other pages would have their own session, but when re-visiting a domain, the domain-specific private session would be loaded.

This way web pages (and third party services within) would notice that the user is recurring, but it would be harder for 3rd-parties to compile a personal profile from your cross-site browsing history.

That said, I know that there are ways to recognize users or their computers even if cookies and history aren't available. But that doesn't mean we cannot make it harder for them :)

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Comments

1

I use private browsing (a.k.a. incognito) on a regular basis for reading news from my local newspaper (HS.fi). They introduced a lovely cookie based restriction that allows non-subscribing visitors to read only five articles per day. Therefore I'm also eager to have such a domain-specific private browsing feature on the Jolla browser.

Okw ( 2015-05-03 17:59:36 +0300 )edit

Maybe I didn't explain it well enought, but I don't think we are talking about the same feature. I did not mean to always start a new incognito session whenever visiting a specifc domain, rather a new private session whenever switching to another domain. So you could e.g. remain authenticated with your Jolla login by the means of cookies, even Google Analytics would know that you are a returning visitor of the Jolla site. But it wouldn't recognize you as the one whom has just been reading a specific article on that news site. So the news site would always recognize you whenever you visit it, and keep on blocking their content. Note aside - if they choose to set up these barriers and you don't think they're appropriate, just use another news site - that's the best way to show them that this kind of barriers can drive people away.

tokaru ( 2015-05-14 00:45:40 +0300 )edit