Vancouver police website adds a “Quick Escape” button that wipes the trail from browser history

The official website of the Vancouver Police Department (vpd.ca) has added a Quick Escape feature — a fast-exit button. When it is pressed, the user is instantly redirected to another site, and the record of the visit to the police resource is deleted from the browser's history.

Mechanisms like this are usually used on websites devoted to sensitive topics — domestic violence, crisis assistance, support for crime victims — so that someone who hastily closes the page in the presence of others leaves no digital trace of their visit.

The news that such a feature had appeared on the website of a law enforcement agency in particular drew notable interest from the community: the post on Hacker News gathered 133 points and 48 comments.

The details of the implementation — exactly what data is erased and how the removal of the record from the history works technically — are not disclosed in the news item itself.

Source: Hacker News