SNOOPINGVILLE—Not really a porn story per se, but for anyone who's ever used Apple's Pivate Browsing function in OS X Safari to surf porn or anything else, assuming that the browsing was in fact... well, private, revelations this week to the contrary serve as a reminder that corporations tend to have their own meanings for words. In this case, Apple's definition of "private" is apparently that something is private if people think its private, even if the data from one's supposedly "private" surfing history is being saved to an "easily accessible" file all along.
On Tuesday, Macissues.com reported that a reader of the site had alerted them to the discovery of a never-before divulged folder. “I was troubleshooting some issues with Safari and opened up /Library/Safari/WebpageIcons.db, and in that file, I was surprised to find all the URLs of sites (stored in plain text) that I and others using my Mac visited in 'private windows' in Safari," wrote Tyler C. "The URLs seem to stay in there basically forever unless you clear out all your browsing data (which defeats the entire purpose of using a 'private window').”
Macissues' Topher Kessler further explained, "This Webpageicon database is the location in which Safari stores the small associated “favicon” image for the visited address (such as the small crossed tools for MacIssues, or the Apple icon for Apple’s sites). This image can be loaded from the Web server each time you access it, but as with many fairly static features of Web pages, Safari will cache this in a small database so it can be used in features like your browser history and bookmarks, among others."
Because this issue is so new, Kessler also offered a few work-arounds for anyone that concerned about it, such as:
1. Use another browser
2. Use a private and encrypted system
3. Manually delete the icon database
In 2011, when it was introduced, we marvelled at what was being called "porn mode," especially in light of Apple's, or perhaps just Steve Jobs' very public distaste for porn.
