Private Browsing: an Inquiry on Usability and Privacy Protection

Abstract

Private browsing is a feature in web browsers to prevent local users from gaining information about browsing sessions. However, it is not clear how well people interpret private browsing's functionalities and what are the privacy gains from using it. Towards studying people's understanding of private browsing, we conducted a survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our survey results show that (1) one third of our participants were not aware of this privacy-enhancing feature, and (2) for people who knew or even used this feature, they had various misconceptions which could put them at risk. In the end, we provide design suggestions to help address these misconceptions.