Private Browsing With Safari
Web browsers today have evolved into incredible free software tools for Internet management. Apple's Safari Web Browser now available for Windows is yet another choice for the web savvy. One built in feature that caught my attention is the Private Browsing feature. This allows you to hide your surfing tracks during any given session. What is really nice is the fact it's integrated in right from the install. There are no plug ins to download, install, and configure.
According to Apple's website this feature is for usage on public networks. No information cached during the session. Also, they advise that when in private browsing mode and want to check your bank statement it is secure using 128-bit encryption. So this means I can go to Starbucks and check my bank statements!?!? Uh…. yeah I will pass on trying that out thanks.
Fantstic tips
Well, you're correct that private browsing is just turning off permanent caching. It's also disabling form saving, persistent sessions (in other words, no "keep me logged in for this site"), saved form data, and browsing history. All in all, not to "secure" or "private".
Incidentally, you should probably be ok checking your bank statements at Starbucks. First off, if your bank is halfway decent at all it will have it's site AES/3DES/Blowfish via SSL secured either 128bit, or (more likely) 256bit. This in and of itself is sufficient to secure just about any data you would care to send (to put it in perspective, it would take the fastest cluster in the world a good 50-100 years to crack the data involved). Secondly, Starbucks uses client isolation on its wifi networks. This means that you can't send/receive data to/from any other nodes connected to the network. (if you don't believe me, connect and run nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24, with the appropriate subnet substituted) This of course doesn't stop clever 18 year-olds with wifi sniffers, but that's where the SSL encryption comes in.
In short, Safari's privacy mode *only* does you any good at all if you're on a public terminal on which you don't want your surfing logged in any way. (that of course doesn't stop proxy servers, DNS logging and router blocks, but that's another comment…)