Google Chrome will protect your incognito tabs with your biometrics

Incognito browsing may not prevent your internet provider and other parties from tracking you, but it does hide your history and your cookies from your regular browsing session. And soon, it may also be possible to hide your incognito tabs from other people handling your Android phone or tablet. Google has activated a new flag in thecurrent stable Chrome releasethat allows you to lock your currently open incognito tabs behind biometric authentication.

As spotted by9to5Google, the feature hasn’t rolled out widely yet, but you may easily activate it in Chrome 105 by heading tochrome://flags/#incognito-reauthentication-for-androidand enabling the flag. Once you’ve restarted your browser, you will then find an option to “Lock incognito tabs when you leave Chrome” in Chrome’sPrivacy and securitysettings. Toggle this on, et voilà—you will need to explicitly unlock incognito tabs whenever you want to access them after you’ve left Chrome. Note that you will still be able to quickly close incognito tabs via the familiar notification, too, all without unlocking first.

Fingerprint unlocking for incognito has been in the works for a long time. We first spotted Google working on it back in 2021, whenthe flag appeared in Chrome 94. It wasn’t working at all at the time, though. It’s strange that it took Chrome for Android this long to get the feature as the iOS version of the browser has already had it for a long time. Here, you can optionally enable Face ID for incognito tabs in settings, too. On the Apple OS, Google offers biometric protection for a few more apps, too, like Google Drive, Search, and Authenticator.

With incognito tab locking now available behind a flag in stable, it hopefully won’t take Google too long to roll it out to everyone using Chrome for Android. This isn’t the only feature to come to Chrome 105 or other upcoming versions of Chrome, though. Check outwhat’s new in every version of Chrome.

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