Recently, Google made a small but significant change to Chrome for iOS.
If you use the browser in that environment, it now allows you to lock your incognito tabs behind a FaceID protection wall, giving you an added layer of security. This new feature makes it much more difficult for people to snoop around on your device and see what you’ve been up to on the web.
If you’ve never used incognito mode before, you should. It’s a superb feature that allows you to visit sensitive sites without having them appear in your browser history, and of interest, it also prevents cookies generated by those sites from being saved. Of course, this protection only extends so far. If you surf your way to a sensitive site and then walk away, leaving your device unlocked, there’s nothing to prevent someone from simply picking your device up and seeing what you’re doing, but as long as you take sensible precautions, incognito mode, especially with the new FaceID protection, provides some pretty solid protection.
If you’re interested in giving the new feature a go, simply open Chrome on your iOS device and enter “Chrome//flags” in the address bar, then press Go on the virtual keyboard. This will open the Chrome Experiments page. Once there, search for “Device Authentication for Incognito” and enable it. That done, close and reopen your browser, then go to Settings and Privacy to actually enable the feature and you’re all set.
If, after playing around with it, you decide you don’t want or need it, simply go back to the Settings and Privacy section and disable it.
It’s a very good addition, and if you value your privacy, then once you’ve tried it on for size, you’ll probably wonder how you ever got along without it. Kudos to Google for the addition. Try it. You’ll love it.
