Google Chrome's new feature to hide your watching content

Privacy is something that everyone truly desires and seeks constantly. The right to privacy gets even more spotlighted when people use the internet and intend to view content that might not be suitable for others in their vicinity. Often, people use the internet for work, socialisation, leisure entertainment and sometimes to discover their vices and other things that are not socially acceptable. All browsing websites have one feature: viewing content history by entering the settings.

The canary version of Google considered the most experimented version of web browsing initiated by Google, is now testing out a new feature through its users. The new feature will allow users to hide the media content they view, such as videos and others while using the incognito mode.

In order to achieve this new content-hiding feature, Google Chrome will avoid displaying the media content or the metadata that is the information of the media being played on the control panel of your operating system. The metadata media hide feature in the incognito mode will allow embedders to be hidden more effectively and quickly.

Chromium Gerrit, the open source project for Google Chromium and a web-based platform for people to host for their contribution to its code, found much evidence and references to this new hiding metadata feature on the incognito.

Although this new feature isn’t readily available across browsing platforms, Google states that it will consider launching it across systems that offer Chrome hosting, such as Windows, Linux, Mac, and Chrome. Furthermore, this feature will be accessible on mobile OS and IOS.

For people who aren’t familiar with what will be shown when this feature is turned on, don’t worry, as we will explain it to you. By turning on this feature, the first thing that happens is Chrome will stop showing your information about all media titles, artists, artwork descriptions and all the other details in your media control window and on the taskbar. Additionally, the information will also be stopped being shown on your device lock screen, and the content information will be replaced by the Google incognito logo and the text saying “ A site is playing the video.”

This feature of not showing the content of the media being played on the taskbar is highly beneficial for the users who view adult content as their secrecy level is enhanced since others won’t be able to tell what is being played. The previous version of incognito that didn’t have this new feature consisted of loopholes because it displayed the content information of the media that was opened even when the screen was minimised or was in preview mode.

From a technical side, Chromium code has enabled MediaSession Client API, due to which media metadata is masked and hidden with the information of the placeholder. The name of Chrome’s API version is SystemMediaControl API, and it is activated when the user goes into incognito mode.

For non-Google Chrome users, other browsing platforms have features named private browsing tabs that work the same as the incognito. The advantage of using private or incognito browsing tabs/ windows is that they increase security as they don’t save passwords, don’t allow to leave traces of activity on the local computer, don’t save passwords, and don’t give suggestions in your search, engines as no information is being saved.

The people who want to try out this feature themselves first need to have Chrome Canary since it is only available on it. Once you have Chrome Canary, type Chrome://flags in the address bar section. By typing this, the system will display a menu that will consist of a menu with the title “hide media metadata for the flags menu when in incognito” settings. From there, you have to change the settings to enabled.

H/T: WindowsLatest

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by Ahmed Naeem via Digital Information World