Google Chrome for Android has launched a new function that will allow you to lock incognito tabs and unlock them via biometric (fingerprint) authenticationwhich certainly seems quite useful, especially for situations where your smartphone is in the hands of another person.
This means that if someone takes your smartphone, it won’t be able to see what you were viewing privately in Chrome, according to a Google blog post. It is a function very useful, especially when you have to lend your phone to someone and you don’t want it to accidentally open your private tabs.
This will work when you are browsing in Incognito mode and you exit tabs. So once you exit an Incognito tab and reopen it, a screen will appear with an option to “Unlock Incognito.” Tapping on this will require fingerprint unlocking.
Of course, not everything remains in the fingerprint unlock, since, if you do not have or do not feel like activating it, You will also have the possibility to hide the tabs with a PINalthough the first option could be slightly more secure, since other people could know or see the PIN of your phone.
New incognito tab lock feature in Google Chrome for Android
Note that this feature has been available in the iOS version of Chrome for iPhone using Face ID or Touch ID for a long time (2020), but now it is being expanded with the arrival of Android.
Of course, all this does not happen automatically, since you will have to activate the function from the privacy and security settings of the application, where you will find a new option titled “Block incognito tabs when exiting Chrome”.
9to5Google reports that the feature hasn’t gone mainstream yet, but nevertheless, if you can turn it on right now or check if you already have it available, you will have to follow these steps (it doesn’t appear for us at the moment):
To activate this feature, tap on the three-dot menu in the upper right corner when accessing Google Chrome Go to Settings and click on Privacy and security There you may find the option “Lock incognito tabs when exiting Chrome”
As we already qualified and given that Google has just started rolling out the feature, the update may not be available to you even though you are using the latest version. In that case, you can go to: chrome://flags/#incognito-reauthentication-for-android.
When doing this, a menu of experimental options will appear and what you have to do is activate the one that says “Reauthentication for Android”. Having activated this feature in Google Chrome, it is most likely that you will have to restart the browser for it to activate correctly and start working in the Android app.
