Some good news this month for Chrome users—finally.
So this is rarity. Even as Apple’s Chrome attack ads air on TV screens around the world, Google has just revealed a surprisingly smart Chrome update for 2 billion Android users that seems to up the security and privacy ante on iPhone and Safari.
Apple’s attack ads feature a flock of birds spying on users’ phones until Apple in the form of Safari comes to the rescue. A modern–day take on Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” the ad began its life online and has now evolved into a mainstream TV commercial. It is accompanied by Safari privacy billboards in major cities around the world.
But Chrome has now hit back with a neat privacy update of its own. As trailed by Leopeva64 on X, “It looks like Chrome for Android will redact sensitive content during screen sharing, screen recording, and similar actions.” When enabled, this should prevent inadvertent sharing of credit card numbers, passwords, or other classifiably sensitive info that has been typed into Chrome fields.
We have all accidentally shared parts of our screens we’d rather not, whether on Zoom, Teams or Meet. And while navigating screen sharing on a laptop is fairly easy, it’s much less intuitive on a phone or tablet, where you’re more likely to share an entire screen than a specific window from a dropdown list.
This feature has not been released, but “there is a new flag in the Canary version to enable this feature.” These Chrome flags enable Google to roll out features for anyone to easily test out in the Canary pre-release software.
Notwithstanding its bad press, Chrome’s Incognito mode has always been pretty good at protecting data from screen shares, redacting everything, but this new feature brings more targeted protection to regular tabs as well.
Google will also introduce an option to close all Incognito tabs. This is critical. Unlike Safari, Chrome does not protect data between Incognito tabs and so private data is only erased and forgotten when all Incognito tabs are closed. Safari does not share data between private browsing tabs, and so when a tab is closed all its data is erased.
Chrome doesn’t get close to Apple when it comes to privacy protection, anti-tracking and the lack of cross-site cookies. But Chrome’s Incognito mode is clearly better than its regular tabs. There is a push within Chrome to make that privacy mode better and easier to us. This is one example, another is the addition of an Incognito button when searching from within Google’s dedicated smartphone app.
I’m sure the Chrome team and users will welcome some good news on the privacy front, coming just a few weeks after the cookie reversal backlash and Apple’s attack on its tracking track-record. Apple doesn’t name Chrome in its ads—it doesn’t need to, but the film itself is called “Flock” which is a cute nod to Chrome’s first, failed Privacy Sandbox cookie alternative, Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC.