Best Accountability's behavior when incognito or private browsing mode is used, depends on the platform. A description of how Best Accountability will work is described below for each platform.

Jump to incognito description for:

• Android
• iOS (iPhone / iPad)
• Windows
• MacOS
• Kindle
• Chrome OS (Chromebook)
• Linux

Android

By default, Best Accountability will alert when incognito mode is used. However, the screenshots Best Accountability captures from incognito mode on Android will be black, unless you adjust specific settings (instructions shown below).

Incognito mode alerts on android

The Best Accountability app analyzes each screenshot to determine if incognito or private mode was used. If it detects that incognito/private browsing was used, it will immediately send a tamper email out to all report recipients including the website that was being visited while incognito mode was used. Below you can see an example of what the email looks like.

Enable screenshot capture of Incognito mode on Android

Newer versions of Chrome have a setting that you can adjust so that incognito mode no longer blocks screenshots from being captured as well. If you follow the instructions below, incognito mode will be captured as normal and alerts won't be sent when incognito mode is used.

1. Open the Chrome app
2. Open a new tab, and type in chrome://flags in the URL bar
3. Type incognito into the search flags box
4. Adjust the toggle from Default to Enabled underneath the Incognito SCreenshot flag.
5. Restart Chrome
6. Screenshots Best Accountability captures of incognito mode through the Chrome app will no longer be blacked out and will no longer trigger alerts.

False positive incognito alerts on Android

Best Accountability needs to analyze screenshots in order to identify incognito/private browser use. It looks for a specific pattern within the screenshot--primarily a mostly black screen. There are times when phones can "glitch" and produce a screenshot that looks identical to an incognito/private browser screenshot, even though incognito wasn't being used. This will result in false positive alerts being sent out. From what we've seen this happens rarely when it does happen, and we'd prefer to deal with the false positive alerts (which contain the website being visited within them when possible) instead of not alerting at all. We'll continue to look for ways to improve the accuracy, but for now false positives, while rare, can occur. When they do, have report recipients check the website being visited and as long as it's clean then there's nothing to worry about.

iOS

Best Accountability will capture the domain name of the website visited when incognito mode is used on iOS. Best Accountability doesn't support screenshots on iOS.

Windows

Best Accountability will capture screenshots and web history of incognito mode on Windows.

MacOS

Best Accountability will capture screenshots of incognito mode on MacOS.

Kindle

Best Accountability will behave the same on Kindle devices as it does on Android devices. See the description above.

Chromebook

Best Accountability will capture screenshots incognito mode on Chrome OS. As long as you've enabled the Best Accountability chrome extension to monitor incognito mode, it will also record all websites visited while using incognito mode as well. Instructions for enabling the extention to monitor incognito mode are included in the setup guide.

Linux

Best Accountability will capture screenshots of incognito mode on Linux.