Google Chrome Adds Ability To Lock Your Saucy Incognito Tabs With Face ID And Touch ID

For those not familiar with Incognito mode, it allows you to browse the web privately and won't save your site history, cookies, site data, or form data. However, if you don't close out your Incognito tab when switching to your "normal" tabs, the last site that you visited would still be visible when switching back.

For example, let's say you use Incognito mode to search for some interesting content. However, after your browsing session, you forget to close out the Incognito tab and hastily switch to your regular browsing tabs. Let's say that you then hand your phone or tablet over to a family member or friend, and they attempt to pull up your Incognito tabs. Boom, roasted!

With the latest update to Chrome, your Incognito tabs can be secured behind Touch ID or Face ID biometric authentication. Enabling this feature is as simple as navigating to Settings --> Privacy --> Lock Incognito Tabs. In our opinion, this is an excellent use of biometric authentication and is yet another way to protect users' privacy. It's also something that Apple doesn't even do with its Safari browser.

Unfortunately, this feature is currently only available to iPhone and iPad users. That's a bummer considering that most Android devices have some form of biometric authentication that could enable this same feature. However, it wouldn't be the first time that Google has showed favoritism to Apple users; the aforementioned 15-minute search time bomb is only available with the Google Search iOS app. The biometric Incognito lock for Chrome first entered beta for a subset of users back in February.