Every time you surf the web, or do something on your computer, you leave tracks of where you have been and what you were doing.

Whether that means pictures, movies, URLs, browser history, etc., it all leaves clues as to your online and offline behaviors.

Privacy means something different to everyone.  Many people aren’t concerned with someone else being able to see where they’ve been online, what files they’ve downloaded, etc.  Other people are VERY concerned and go to great lengths to cover their tracks online.

When covering your tracks online, there are two main areas of concern. 

1. Covering your online activity (masking your IP address), clearing cache and browser history, etc.
2. Covering your offline (local) activity, what files you’ve opened, programs you’ve run, etc.

Here are our Top 5 Ways to address both of these areas.

1. Clear your Browser Cache - Each browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc) stores files locally, in their cache, when you visit a web site.  The files they store could be pictures, graphics, cookies, etc., depending on the type of site you visit.  The locally stored files are retrieved if you visit the page again, or reload the page, to make the page load faster.  So conceptually it’s great because it improves your browsing experience, but the downside is that it paints a pretty clear picture of your online activity. 

   Clearing your cache removes those files from the cache, thus making it more difficult for someone to reconstruct your online activity.  In Firefox, it’s a matter of hitting ctrl-shift-delete or going to Tools then selecting "Clear Private Data…" 

   Internet Explorer is a few more steps, click on General > Browsing History > Delete > Select what you want to delete (or delete all).

2. Wipe files, don’t delete - Deleting your cache is fine, and serves the purpose for most situations.  However, as you may or may not know, deleting files doesn’t actually remove them from your computer.  They are recoverable using a variety of methods.  In order to completely remove a file from your computer, and make it so that it can’t be recovered you need to wipe the data. 

   Wiping overwrites the data (and the data’s slack space) over and over again.  There are many free utilities out there, the one we like is called Eraser.  It integrate with the explorer shell, and adds the ability to right-click a file (or the recycle bin) and erase instead of delete. It’s a good idea to wipe files from your PC when you want them permanently gone, and also wipe your browser cache and history when you want to completely erase your tracks. 

   Firefox keeps your history and cache in your profile, while IE keeps it in a temporary Internet files directory. Firefox generates a random profile name, and stores it at %appdata%\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles (Vista) or %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles (XP).

3. Anonymous Proxies - If you are ultra-concerned with privacy, you can browse the Internet through anonymous proxy servers.  An anonymous proxy strips off your identifying information and replaces it with bogus information, so when you visit a website, it doesn’t show your IP address.  

   While this is again one of those things sounds great in theory, most of the free anonymous proxy servers are painfully slow and will make surfing too frustrating for most.  The option is there however, for people who absolutely need to ensure their tracks are covered.

4. Clear Toolbar Data - If you use the Google toolbar, or Yahoo, Alexa, or any of the thousand other browser toolbars out there, make sure you clear the search data there as well.  If not, when someone types something into the toolbar’s search area, it brings up your history which shows things you’ve searched on before that begin with the same letter or same word. 

   Clearing the toolbar will vary from one to another, but in Google’s toolbar for example, you’d click on the search box drop down and click "clear history".

5. Remove Most Recently Used (MRU) list - Most programs keep an MRU list showing the last used items.  The most recently opened documents list is one of the ones you might be interested in, as it shows the last documents you’ve opened.  You can remove or clear the list in one of several ways. 

   In Windows XP, you can right-click on the Start Menu, choose Properties > Start Menu > Customize > Advanced > Clear List.  You can then uncheck "List my most recently opened documents" to prevent it from keeping a list in the future.  Another method would be to manually remove it from the registry.  Any time you tweak the registry, you run the risk of damaging your system so do so at your own risk. 

   If you want to remove the MRU from the registry, the key is found at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer and then remove the key for "Recent Docs". Again, back up your registry before you make any changes, there is always the risk of damage to your system.

Privacy is one of those things that is different for everyone.  Discover what your tolerance for risk is, and use the tools at your disposal to keep you private things private and reduce the chances of misuse of your private data.