Stay safe online: How
to protect your privacy on different web browsers
Firefox recently
announced the Forget button and DuckDuckGo search support for
Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Mozilla claims that the Forget button lets you
delete your recent browsing activity, while DuckDuckGo is a search solution
that does not track who you are or what you search for.
While Firefox has some
nifty features for protecting your privacy online, other popular
web browsers are not too bad either. The settings may vary and different
browsers handle your information differently. While there’s always a risk of
giving out some private information when you’re online, it’s important that you
know what your options are and what you can do to keep your data safe. Note
that even if your web browser protects your information, third-party add-ons or
extensions can still use your data when installed on your web browser.
Founded by Google,
Chrome is one of the world’s most popular web browsers. Going by Google’s
reputation of collecting your data, it’s easy to doubt if your information is
safe on Chrome. But for those who don’t know, Chome has quite a solid system in
place for keeping your web session private.
While Google claims to
use your information to improve your web browsing experience, you have the
option to opt-out of these features.
If you don’t want
other users to see which websites you’ve visited or to delete any private
information stored in the form of cache or cookies, go to Options (the button
with three horizontal bars)>History> Clear browsing data. Alternatively,
you can delete specific websites by clicking on the check boxes against the
website name.
Chrome also provides
the ‘Incognito window’ option under settings, which prevents Chrome from
storing your browsing history including cookies or search history after you’ve
closed all of your incognito tabs. However, any files you download or bookmark
you create will be kept.
You can further
customise your privacy settings, such as preventing websites from tracking you
by going to Settings> Show advanced settings.
Firefox
By default, Firefox
remembers your browsing history and allows sites to track you. You can change
this by clicking on the menu (indicated by three horizontal bars on the top
right) and selecting options.
Under Privacy, select
the first option: Tell sites I do not want to be tracked.
Under History, select Never
remember history from the dropdown. The Clear all current
history option will delete all the recently opened files, including
cache and, browsing and download history. You can uncheck what you don’t want
Firefox to delete.
Internet Explorer
Like Chrome and
Firefox, Internet Explorer also has a stringent security system in place that
you can make use of.
To delete your
browsing history automatically after each web session, click on the settings
symbol to go to Internet options> General and check the box that says Delete
browsing history on exit.
You can prevent
websites from tracking your preferences through Safety and
clicking onTurn on Do Not Track requests.
Under Internet
Options>Privacy you can manually block websites using Sites, turn on pop-up
blocker or select the level of security for your browser.
InPrivate
Browsing prevent Internet Explorer from storing data about your browsing
session. This includes cookies, temporary Internet files, history, and other
data. Toolbars and extensions are disabled by default. This option also lets
you dictate whether websites can track you or not.
ActiveX controls in
some third-party plugins have security risks. ActiveX Filtering in Internet
Explorer 9 and above prevents all ActiveX Controls from running when enabled.
If you go to a site that requires ActiveX Controls, you can add them to the
whitelist if you trust the site. Only websites on the list will be able to run
ActiveX Controls.
