Quote:With the release of Chrome 76, Google fixed a loophole that allowed web sites to detect if a visitor was using Incognito mode.  Unfortunately, their fix led to two other methods that can still be used to detect when a visitor is browsing privately.
 
Some web sites were using Incognito mode detection in order to prevent users from bypassing paywalls or to give private browsing users a different browsing experience.
 
This was being done by checking for the availability of Chrome's FileSystem API, which was disabled in Incognito mode. If a site could access the FileSystem API then the visitor was in a normal browsing session and if it could not access the API the user was in Incognito mode.
 
As Google wanted users to be able to browse the web privately and for their browsing mode choices to be private as well, they have closed a loophole by making the API available in both browsing modes. As part of this fix, instead of using disk storage for the FileSystem API, when in Incognito mode they are using a transient memory filesystem that gets cleared when a session is closed.
 
The use of a memory filesystem, though, create two new loopholes that could be used to detect Incognito mode, which are described below.