Safety and Privacy

Concerned about someone knowing which websites you have visited?

Here's how to reduce the chances that your net travels will be traced.

Browsers like Netscape are designed to leave traces behind indicating where you've been and what you've been looking at on the net. It's hard to absolutely guarantee that your  travels on the net can't be traced at all, but here are some simple things you can do to reduce the chances that someone can look through your computer and find out what you've been reading.

In general, you want to erase two different things after you've left a web site that you don't want traced.

One is the "cache" where the computer stores copies of files you've looked at recently with your browser. This will be a directory that will have various files in it. You will want to erase all of those files. To do this in Navigator 4.0, open the EDIT menu, choose PREFERENCES, choose ADVANCED, then choose CACHE. A screen will appear where you can click on the buttons, "Clear Memory Cache" and "Clear Disk Cache." Click on each of these and then hit "OK." Your cache will now be cleared.

The second thing you need to erase is your History List. This will be a single file containing the addresses of the places you've recently visited. In Navigator 4.0, click on the EDIT menu, choose PREFERENCES, then choose NAVIGATOR. A "Clear History" button will appear on the screen. Select it, then choose "OK." Your history list will now be erased.

Other browsers will be slightly different in the detail of what's required to do these two things. But in any case, what you'll need to do is clear your cache and erase your history list.   In Internet Explorer you will need to open TOOLS then INTERNET OPTIONS and click on CLEAR HISTORY.  

Again, this doesn't guarantee that your browsing can't be traced. Someone with greater computer sophistication will still be able to reconstruct your net travels. But it's a good thing to do to make it more difficult for someone to know where you've been. 

If someone notices that you have deleted some of the browsing history a good reason to give for your actions would be that you heard or read that by deleting these temporary history files your computer would be faster and waste less disk space, which is true.

Adapted with permission from the Safety Zone and Gay Partner Abuse Project