Internet browser privacy is essential for a number of reasons.

Without any web browser privacy anyone who is either sitting in front of your computer or connecting to it remotely, (for more on overall computer security) with a little know how can see sites that you have visited, when they were visited and even usernames and passwords used.

And once all the information has been sorted/collated through it does not take a great deal of time to match usernames and passwords to sites visited.

Good internet browser privacy is very straight forward, there are 4 main areas that need to be cleared or deleted

This consists of

Internet cache or temp files – every time you visit a website the web page or portions of it are stored locally on your computer so next time you visit the page it does not have to download everything meaning the page will appear to load faster.

Cookies - this is the industry standard way for web masters to see when someone visits there website, how long they visited for and if they return, its spyware in it’s most harmless form.

Internet History – the internet history is basically a calendar of all the websites you visit

Forms / Auto complete settings – whenever you visit a website you have to fill in a form if you have already filled in a form before with common information it should remember the words as you begin to type

There are a number of applications on the market that will delete all of the above with a single mouse click, but for those who’d sooner do this manually read on..

Browsers

Internet Explorer

Tools – Internet Options –General – Browsing History Delete

From here you can delete Temporary Internet Files – Cookies – History – Form Data & Password

Firefox

To clear all private data using Firefox just select Tools – Clear Private Data, this will then give you the option to delete – History – Cache – Remove Cookies – Passwords – Offline Website Info.

Setting Firefox to automatically delete browsing tracks

Tips

Firefox has a nice feature to make internet browser privacy very easy , clear all private data when closing the browser – you can select this from Tools – Options – Privacy tab – under the private data section select Always Clear my Private Data When I Close Firefox, this is great as it means as soon as you stop browsing and close Firefox all your browser history and foot prints are removed from your computer

Internet Explorer can be set to delete all temp files when closing the browser – this can be set from Tools – Internet Options – Advanced and scrolling down to Security and then making sure Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed is ticked.

Settings Internet Explorers options

Another good setting is to make sure that encrypted pages such as banking websites are not saved to the hard drive – this can be set from Tools – internet Options – Advanced – Security & make sure Do not save encrypted pages to disk is ticked.

computer adviser internet browser privacy article