September 2009 Newsletter – Protect your privacy online

Just by visiting a website we divulge information to the website host we may not be entirely comfortable. The main web browsers now offer features for you to remain anonymous from prying eyes with a simple click of a button.
Information such as your Google searches, which websites you’ve been to, even form information such as you name address and email address could be stored, and captured by the sites you visit. What’s more if you have multiple accounts with one company then all the information could be aggregated into ‘your file’, Google for example may have details of your emails, your browser searches, your contacts, your calendar, all tied to the details you gave it when you signed up for your Gmail account or webmaster account. Remaining totally anonymous on the web is difficult if not impossible, but the private browsing function allows you to make sure your covering some of your tracks.
For Internet Explorer on the PC then simply click on ‘safety’ in the top right hand corner of the screen, and enable ‘InPrivate Browsing’

For FireFox on the PC or the Mac simply click on the ‘Tools’ menu at the top, and select ‘Start Private Browsing’

For Safari on the Mac (and certainly the PC) don’t do anything; switch to FireFox of IE. Apple say their InPrivate functionality is better after the storm of criticism it received earlier in the year (in some cases it didn’t work at all), but it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Anything you go to after this while will still be able to gather information about your current visit, but will find it difficult to tie this information to any history or future visits. Anything you visit will also not be stored on your computer, in the History or Temporary Internet files so it prevents other users of a shared computer seeing where you have been.

 

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