Incongnito mode
Hi,
We are creating a new national portal in Norway, which is for victims of violence. This portal provides helpful information for the victims.
When we started to create this portal an important issue came up. How can we provide the best anonymity possible for these victims?
A suggestion is that we open links in a incognito mode, but we cant find a way to force open incognito mode. Is there a way to do this? We are open for suggestions. The main issu is to have a clean history.
All Replies (8)
I've called the big guys to help you. Good luck.
Websites cannot determine whether a browser opens a link in regular mode or private/incognito mode. However, you certainly can recommend it and give easy steps for users to do it.
For Firefox, I would mention both the option of using private windows and the "Forget About This Site" feature.
- Forget About This Site appears on the right-click context menu when viewing pages in history. It erases everything about a particular site from Firefox including history, cookies, bookmarks, pop-up permissions, etc. This would be useful if someone forgot to use a private window.
I'm not sure at what side you want to guarantee the anonymity.
Is that on your website or what data is stored on the computer of visitors?
Private Browsing mode only prevents Firefox from storing data on the hard drive, it doesn't make a difference of how a website sees you (IP, user agent).
You can use websites like these to see how your location is reported via a reverse DNS look up of your IP:
We want to prevent data to be stored on the computer. Since the victims often live with the abuser. Things that we cant prevent is keylogger and so forth, but we want to do as mush as we can for the victim.
If the point is to prevent storing data locally then private browsing mode is a good choice.
For normal mode you can use "Forget About This Site" of a history item.
Private browsing is the best choice i think. The main problem is that many people dont know that it even exists and thats why we want to force open it if you arent in one all ready.
We are trying to think like a victim: Your stressed, you are afraid and paranoid. The last thing you are thinking about is probarbly private browsing and how to erase your history. Afraid the abuser finds out that you are browsing the portal.
Do you know if it will be possible to open links in private browsing in the future?
A web page doesn't know about PB mode. It is up to the user to open a New Private Window and open the page in this window. You can only give directions to users to open a private browsing mode or incognito window in the browser.
You can submit suggestions for new features using the feedback site or by filing a "bug" (request for enhancement):
There might also be a mailing list where you could interest someone in moving this idea forward: https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo
For example, you might propose that Mozilla add "private" as a feature to the window.open() method (Window.open() - Web API Interfaces on MDN). I think that concept exists internally in the code of Firefox, but it is not exposed to websites and there would need to be a policy discussion. (Also, it wouldn't work if the user diverts the scripted window to a tab, which is an option.)
Any change likely would take a long time to implement (at least 3 months, probably longer), so in the near term, user education will still be necessary.