Microsoft seems to be working on an interesting new feature that could improve user privacy when running Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome in incognito mode.
While Incognito Mode does give your web browsing a much higher level of privacy than normal browsings such as your browsing history, cookies or other website data, and details entered into forms won’t be stored still it definitely has limitations. According to Microsoft, whenever you type anything into the browser, Windows is still being used to learn a user’s typing habits in order to offer autocomplete and autocorrect suggestions. However, the company is now working on to offer improvements to this situation and says that it will now begin to treat all text typed while in Incognito mode as private, which implies that it will no longer be analyzed at all. This is similar to how smartphones treat text typed into secure text fields.
Microsoft’s new feature will prevent the operating system from remembering, learning any words you enter and making text suggestions.
A commit revealed that Microsoft will be connecting Chromium and Windows 10 together to protect the words that you are entering in incognito being typed from Windows’ prediction services.
“We need to set input scope to IS_PRIVATE if we are in “Incognito” or “guest” mode on Windows 10,” the company detailed its plan in a commit that is still in development and cannot be tested in Canary builds.
“On Windows 10, we should use IS_PRIVATE input scope if user is in “incognito” or “guest” mode because we don’t want input service to provide text intelligence for private data,” Microsoft explains the problem in a bug post on Chromium Gerrit.
This feature will surely step up your privacy by keeping extremely confidential data from being tracked. For now, the feature is still in its early stage of development and there’s no word on when it will be widely rolled out to consumers.