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When you surf on the
internet, a good amount of information is stored on
your hard drive. The type of information varies, as
does the reasons for having it stored on your computer.
Some of the data includes:
- Cookie Information:
Basically a text file with entries from some of
the sites you visit. The bad thing about this is
the file contains the url from each site that makes
an entry, so anyone who would want to see what sites
you've been to could open up the cookies.txt file
under your profile and see every website you've
visited that set cookies. (Almost every website
sets cookies)
- Preference Data:
This includes items such as your history, and auto-fill
features on your web browser. All of those past
websites have to be stored somewhere and that somewhere
is on your hard drive. Also, the autofill feature
can be troublesome when someone like your grandmother
uses your computer, begins to enter a url, and auto-complete
convieniently starts filling in every porn site
you've been to in the past month.
- Cache: In
order for your browser to load pages quicker, it
stores images and other parts of a webpage on your
computer. This is to allow the pages you visit frequently
to be the quickest loading pages. This can be deleted
manually in most browsers. For example, in Internet
Explorer, go to 'Tools' -> 'Internet Options'
and there is a button that says 'Delete Files' under
'Temporary Internet Files'. This will earase your
cached files.
For most people, clearing
your history, cache and cookies through your web browser's
tools is good enough, but if you are looking to get
a bullet proof solution, specialized software would
be the best way to go. HistoryKill
is the industry leader, but there are many similar
products that could be found by doing a simple search
on Google for 'erase browser history' or something
similar. Click on the image below to go to the HistoryKill
website.
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