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If This Browser Could Talk: Safari Private Surfing *Not* So Private

Posted in Apple by Dan at 4:19 pm

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Tisk, Tisk, Tisk. You people know who you are! You think a little check mark next to “Private Browsing” in Safari will keep your slick surfing habits secret? No, No dear reader! Safari will squeal on you! Doesn’t matter even if you quit the application or reset Safari.

It seems Safari like leaving little trails of what it does in its cache. If you open up the Terminal in MacOS 10.5 and type in:

dscacheutil -cachedump -entries Host

You will see a list of all the websites you visited even with private browsing enabled.

To destroy this last bit of evidence in Terminal type in:

dscacheutil -flushcache

This will purge Safaris secret cache and keep your little indiscretions secret.

Its also important to note that this cache is also emptied when you log out of your user account or restart your computer. Seems like Apple’s little code monkeys will need to code a little harder to fix this little snafu. All evil lurks in the logs!

Thanks to Tim for the tip! Safe surfing!

9 Comments, Comment or Trackback

  1. Roger

    It looks as if it keeps a record of Firefox browsing as well.

    Mar 14th, 2008

  2. Quentin Smith

    This is simply your machine’s DNS cache… it has absolutely nothing to do with Safari. Hostnames will show up in the DNS cache if *anything* on your computer requests them. Not saying that this isn’t a security problem, but it’s not Safari’s problem.

    –Quentin

    Mar 15th, 2008

  3. Christopher

    I should probably point out that this is the DNS cache for the entire system that you’re viewing/clearing - and thusly will contain a list of webservers with which communication has been established (or more acurately, DNS lookups have occurred against those servers) from *any* application in the system.

    So, technically, if you use Firefox’s ‘Clear Private Data’, you’ll still need to flush the cache to remove any traces. The same would occur if you were to ping a server, check email, or perform just about any internet communication, really.

    The purpose of the DNS cache, of course, is to prevent the system from constantly have to re-look up the IPs (and other DNS data) of servers which it has already requested of your DNS server - which has a significant latency in and of itself.

    Mar 15th, 2008

  4. Mike D

    ok I’m really curious… why is safari displayed running in windows in that picture?

    Mar 15th, 2008

  5. John N

    Mike D safari is available to windows

    Mar 15th, 2008

  6. Mike D

    …. I .. wow *looks up* “oooooohhh” *moves big ass rock*

    Mar 15th, 2008

  7. Justin

    Uhm, this isn’t Safari’s secret cache. This is system level cacheing. While the majority of DNS lookups are done by Safari - Mail, iChat and anything that needs to resolve DNS names writes to and reads from this cache. It’s not a bug or “snafu.”

    Mar 16th, 2008

  8. Robert Nicholson

    What about /private/var/folders then? Does it cache in there when private browsing is enabled?

    Sep 4th, 2008

  9. macuser8

    I would be happy if I could simply get rid of ancient websites names that come up in the address field as autocompleted ’suggestions’- Can this ‘autocomplete’ function be disabled in Safari? Thanks

    Sep 6th, 2008

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