Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we take a look at one of the more interesting issued U.S. patents of the new year, as Google innovates in the field of internet user browsing privacy.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp33
Internet users have for some time been able to browse in incognito or private modes in various browser applications. These modes mean that your search history, cookies from a session, and browsing history will not be retained on your computer. In addition to preventing others from snooping on your internet history, these modes can be used to avoid autofill information, accidental saving of important log-in credentials to accounts, logging into multiple accounts on a website in different windows, and performing searches not affected by your history or other users on the same device.
These modes have been only manually activated to date, requiring diligence of the user in remembering to activate private browsing whenever it is desired. In January, Google has secured a patent that innovates and moves private browsing to the next level. The patent, U.S. Patent No. 8,935,798, is directed to a system and a computer method of automatically enabling private browsing so that the user does not have to manually activate privacy mode.
The method words by having the browser analyze the content of the web page to determine whether privacy mode is appropriate. For example, the patent claims specifically recite having the browser determine whether a web page being opened was previously filtered or selected to not appear in search results, and if so, the privacy mode is automatically started and the web page is opened in that privacy mode. Thus, the user can establish parameters for automatically triggering privacy mode – such as when they enter a credit card number on a site, or when they visit certain high-security websites – and the protection will just happen. It's a potentially very smart implementation of privacy mode browsing when it matters most.
This could be a potential boon for helping keep personal information private, but as with all privacy mode browsing, this does not keep websites and service providers from tracking your activity. Furthermore, high quality forensic techniques have proven to still be able to reconstruct the browsing history in the current iterations of privacy modes. And granting the patent to Google may mean this technology remains locked up in a single browser like Chrome unless Google licenses or shares this technology to competitors, which not all users will adopt.
The bottom line: Although this patent is a win for most under privacy law, it will not change the fact that privacy mode browsing is no more protected from official searches and seizures than regular browsing. So no becoming a criminal or terrorist and expecting this new innovation to somehow shield you in court from having your online misdeeds be discovered and used against you. Still, anything that can help keep credit card and bank numbers and login credentials more secure is a step in the right direction. Enjoy the smart, private browsing.
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