So far we have all found solace in the fact that the Chrome Incognito mode and Firefox Private Browsing exist to allow us keep our intimate encounters (read porn history) to ourselves. However, what came to the rescue while gaming could be putting us in trouble in this regard.
An Nvidia based bug has been plaguing your PCs for years that can expose our private browsing history to everyone.
So what happened was that a Diablo 3 fan, while loading the game, saw that images from his Chrome Incognito were being displayed on the screen. Technically, those details should not even be easily accessible on the device let alone being displayed openly.
The guy whose name is Evan Anderson took to Google and even submitted a bug report. On his blog he explained how exactly this is happening:
GPU memory is not erased before giving it to an application. This allows the contents of one application to leak into another. When the Chrome incognito window was closed, it’s framebuffer was added to the pool of free GPU memory, but it was not erased. When Diablo requested a framebuffer of its own, Nvidia offered up the one previously used by Chrome. Since it wasn’t erased, it still contained the previous contents. Since Diablo doesn’t clear the buffer itself (as it should), the old incognito window was put on the screen again.
Sadly, Google says that Chrome Incognito mode does not guarantee that your private browsing data will be saved on a shared computer.
The bug is related to Nvidia and so long as it gets fixed, if you are using their GPU you could be next.
