Browsing porn in Google Chrome ‘Incognito Mode’ could return to haunt you

If you use Google Chrome’s Incognito mode to hide your browsing habits, and also have Nvidia graphics card within your PC, you could be in for a nasty shock.

A bug discovered by University of Toronto engineering student Evan Anderson (via IBTimes) could be compromising the privacy of users and may lead to considerable embarrassment.

On his blog Anderson explained what happened when he started up the Diablo III game, only to be greeted by the same smut he’d been enjoying earlier that day.

He wrote: “When I launched Diablo III, I didn’t expect the pornography I had been looking at hours previously to be splashed on the screen. But that’s exactly what replaced the black loading screen.

“Like a scene from Hollywood, the game temporarily froze as it launched, preventing any attempt to clear the screen. The game unfroze just before clearing the screen, and I was able to grab a screenshot.”

The issue, he believes, was caused by a bug in Nvidia’s GPU drivers, which stopped the GPU memory from being erased.

See also: Oculus founder won’t be hard on Rift porn

Anderson said this caused the contents of one application, Google Chrome, to leak into the new application, Diablo III.

The affected user, who fortunately wasn’t in a public setting when struck by the bug, was able to replicate the issue by writing a program that scanned GPU memory for zero pixels.

As Anderson points out, this has multiple worrying privacy ramifications for users of shared computers, who could see their activity pop up on another user’s screen long after their supposedly ‘Incognito’ session has ended.

The engineering student claims he submitted the bug to Nvidia and Google two years ago, but it has yet to be fixed.

If we were perusing porn in Chrome on machines running an Nvidia GPU (which of course we’re not), we’d be switching to Firefox or Safari’s private browsing modes right about now.