Opening the "Private Browsing" Data - Acquiring Evidence of Browsing Activities

The growing concern of users about the confidentiality of data generated by web browsing activities made browser developers include options for safer and confidential browsing in their products. For users those options, when functionally compliant with data security guidelines, guarantee online privacy. For law enforcement agents, this functionality introduces another obstacle for data acquisition towards evidence gathering. No matter which case, it is important to assess and validate private browsing techniques. The presented method shows that for some browsers it is possible to recover text and graphical data related to pages visited during private navigation, in clear violation of this tool basic functional requirement.