Safari Private, perhaps not quite so private

[NSquirrel]

I do not use the private mode of Safari very often, but I needed to this weekend to check the location of a restaurant our daughter booked for my wife’s birthday. I used the private mode as it was to be a surprise and I did not want it found accidently in the history.

I located the website, checked the menu, location, expected region of the bill, etc. and then went back to normal viewing mode. Later, long after I had shutdown Safari and put the iPad to sleep, I woke the ipad and went back to private and noticed that I could use the back arrow to go back through the private pages I had viewed, which surprised me. I expected the private history to have been deleted.

I did another shutdown and a reset but nothing cleared it. I did not try to clear the history in normal mode, as I want to keep it. (Obviously the private history did not appear in the normal mode history.)

I tried the same on my iPhone 8, both phone and iPad on 11.3.1, and had the same results and was still there this morning. Hence it seems that the private mode is not quite so private after all.

(BTW, the restaurant was excellent. Rabot 1745, Borough Market, London, with a cocoa theme menu and what a menu!)

 

[NSquirrel]

Follow up to my previous post.

I found out how to delete the retained history, in private mode, so that one cannot use the ‘back’ icon to move to earlier pages even if Safari has been closed down in the meantime.

Use the tab icon, of two overlapping squares, to display the open tab or tabs and then click the close ‘x’ icon on all pages shown.

Now creating a new private page no longer gives a means of moving to earlier pages.