Confidentiality has long been at the center of many efforts for software developers and mobile phone manufacturers. Google has made various movements in recent months (use of Chrome for 2FA, encrypted RCS messages, etc.) seeking to improve precisely on this point and the code of one of its main applications, Google Chrome for Android, shows that it will soon be assimilated with iOS at a key point.
It is about browsing in incognito mode with Chrome, a mode that does not leave traces in the form of cookies or stores URLs in the history, and which will soon be even more secure by asking for a password or our fingerprint. to access its content. Google wants to put Chrome’s incognito mode for Android behind a biometric wall
Password or fingerprint to return to private browsing mode
The code was discovered in one of the latest versions of the Chrome Canary program, the beta version of Google’s browser which has one of its headquarters in the Android ecosystem. The code alerts the arrival of a series of flags or flags, options which can be easily activated once made public, and which will allow protect incognito tabs with a password or with our fingerprint.
Operation, from what can be seen through the code, is similar to what is already tested in Chrome for iOS. It means that once we have enabled this option and restarted the browserwe can now enable the protection of private browsing windows and tabs with a password. And that won’t mean that we have to put the pin or our fingerprint every time we open a window but on our return.
If at any time we open an application or travel to the desktop of our Android, leaving the browser with its incognito tabs in the background, we will have to put the fingerprint or the pin to come back and review the content incognito
In Chrome for iOS, the version is still in testing and has not been released for normal system users, so it’s predictable that something similar will happen on Android. Let Google implement and test it and it still takes a while to see it released in the current version of Chrome. In the meantime, note that a major security improvement for Chrome on Android is on the way.
Via | Chromestory