
Ask HN: How does this website know I'm in incognito mode? - MarkMc
When I try to view this page [1] in incognito mode it says, &quot;You must exit incognito mode to read the content&quot;. How does it know I&#x27;m in incognito mode?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;429438&#x2F;dear-everyone-teaching-programming-youre-doing-it-wrong&#x2F;
======
phillipseamore
From looking at the source code they are using some mixture of these:

[https://github.com/Maykonn/js-detect-incognito-private-
brows...](https://github.com/Maykonn/js-detect-incognito-private-browsing-
paywall)

[https://gist.github.com/matyasfodor/15e8863ab15baf4791a5fa4c...](https://gist.github.com/matyasfodor/15e8863ab15baf4791a5fa4c748b64af)

And FYI in Chrome it's very easy to just F12, Application tab, Clear storage
in the left menu and "Clear site data" at the bottom on the right to get past
all these "you've read too much" blockers.

------
samjanis
Just tried using Firefox Quantum 62.2.2 on Debian with different
configurations - NoScript enabled and disabled, and tracking protection
enabled and disabled. Can't seem to replicate what you're getting.

What browser and OS are you using? Do you have any plugins/extensions active?
(Ad blockers, etc. I don't run any, NoScript does a better job.)

~~~
MarkMc
Seems to happen in Chrome for Mac and Android. No extensions or plugins.

~~~
samjanis
Gotcha. Turns out to be Chrome (or Chromium) specific.

In article.js loaded with this page there is a section that looks like:

dataLayer.push({event:"mittr:detectIncognitoMode",action:"detect",category:"incognito-
mode",label:n})

Commenting out the function block surrounding it where it starts with
"function y() {..." stops the class ".incognito-wall-shown" from being applied
to "section.incognito-wall" found in the main HTML page - although this is
just a quick dig and haven't debugged any further (I'm halfway through
something else but this caught my interest ;) )

