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How to make Safari’s Private Browsing feature actually private

May 19, 2009 by Ross McKillop 

If you’ve been using Safari’s Private Browsing feature to keep your web-tracks hidden, it might come as a surprise to you that you are leaving a very visible record of the sites you’ve been visiting. This tutorial will show you how to remove those records.

  1. Using a Terminal command, anyone with access to your Mac (local or remote) can get a list of the sites that you’ve visited, even with Safari’s Private Browsing feature enabled.

    2. safari's private browsing feature

  2. Safari gives you a bit of a ‘warm and fuzzy’ feeling of private browsing with their explanation of the Private Browsing feature.

    3. safari's private browsing feature explanation

  3. Try it out for youself. Enable Private Browsing and go to a couple of web sites.
  4. Now open a Terminal by selecting Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal. Enter the command:

    dscacheutil -cachedump -entries Host

  5. You’ll be presented with a list of those same sites you just went to.

    6. terminal with a command output

  6. The good news is that the dscacheutil utility comes with a way for you to clear those entries. Enter the command (in a Terminal):

    dscacheutil -flushcache

    7. terminal with dscacheutil flushcache command

  7. That will clear out the Directory Service cache (the location all of that information was being stored). Now run the dscacheutil -cachedump -entries Host command again. This time you’ll get a blank Directory Service cache.

    8. blank dscacheutil entry

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Filed Under: Safari, Tutorials

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One Response to “How to make Safari’s Private Browsing feature actually private”

  1. Week in Geek: The 3 Day Weekend Edition :: the How-To Geek on June 13th, 2009 9:22 pm

    [...] How to make Safari’s Private Browsing feature actually private My good buddy Ross writes up an article exposing Safari’s private browsing feature as, well, not-so-private after all! He also explains how to cover your tracks. (More on this in the near future here at HTG). [...]

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