ERASE WHAT YOU DO ON THE WEB
Tracking cookies from your browsers
All the main web browsers now offer protection against website cookies by allowing you to either block them all (which can stop some sites working properly) or block only the tracking variety from third-party sources. But removing cookies that have already been planted on your PC, or have slipped through your browser’s net, is less easy to do, particularly if you want to keep ‘good’ cookies that sign you into websites but delete ‘bad’ ones that follow you around the internet. If you use several browsers, this task becomes even more difficult.
Fortunately, help is at hand from Privacy Eraser, which simplifies the process of wiping unwanted cookies while keeping useful ones. Click the Browsers tab to see options for all the browsers installed on your computer – or at least the most popular ones, including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi.
The Cookies box for each of these should already be ticked, and when you click the three-dot button next to it ( 1 in our screenshot above right), the Cookie Manager will show you a list of all the cookies installed in that browser 2 . Select all those you want to keep to stop the related websites logging you out, then click OK to confirm. If you’re unsure, click the ‘Automatic keep’ button 3 to let Privacy Eraser decide for you, though it mainly chooses cookies for webmail services.
PrivaZer’s cookie-cleaning works in a different way by listing them all in one place, rather than organising them by browser. This makes it easier to decide which cookies to retain and which to remove, especially when they appear in several browsers. To access this option, click ‘Scan specific traces’ on the home screen and choose ‘Internet activities’. Select ‘Cookies, Super/ Evercookies’ under ‘Select scans’ (super cookies let websites identify your browser and are harder to remove than standard ones), then click ‘See cookies’.
In the Cookies box that opens, choose Manual to select which cookies to keep and remove – those in the ‘To delete’ list on the right (see screenshot below left) are most likely to be tracking cookies. Click the ‘Show all’ dropdown menu to filter cookies by type and browser, or select Smart to save cookies related to specific companies. Once you’ve made your selection, go back to the previous screen and click Scan then Clean to remove unwanted cookies.
Browsing history and internet cache
Anyone who wants to know which websites you’ve visited and when can instantly find out by pressing Ctr-H to view your browser’s History. It’s the biggest potential privacy leak on any PC, but few of us bother to regularly clear our histories to cover our online tracks. Websites stored in your History auto-complete when you start typing their URLs into your browser’s address bar, which makes them quicker to revisit but also reveals details of your web activities.
As you’d expect, Privacy Eraser’s Browsers tab includes the option to delete your Internet History from all the browsers you have installed. You should also tick the boxes to wipe the following: Internet Cache – the temporary internet files folder that contains copies of images, videos and other content from pages you’ve visited; Sessions, which keeps logs of the sites you’ve visited; and Download History, which stores details of files you’ve downloaded from the web. Note that deleting the latter only removes the list of downloads from your browser, not the files themselves.
PrivaZer adopts a similar approach to deleting your browsing history and other details of your internet activities, but is able to perform a deeper and more precise clean. Click ‘Scan specific traces’ then ‘Internet activities’ and select ‘Internet browsing’ ( in our screenshot above).
Click the relevant link for your browser, such as ‘Firefox, Pale Moon, LibreWolf’ or ‘Chrome, Edge (Chromium), Brave, Vivaldi’ to choose from a long list of datadeletion options. These include ‘Visited sites’, ‘Typed sites’ (URLs you manually entered into the address bar), ‘Visited links’ (those you clicked on web pages), ‘Media cache’ (including images and videos), and ‘Downloads history’.
We particularly like that you can remove saved search queries from your browser, both from its search box/address bar and from the websites for Google, Bing and Yahoo. You’re likely to be surprised by the number of internet traces PrivaZer finds when you click Scan – nearly 77,000 on our PC – but these can all be deleted with a single click.
Saved passwords and form data
Storing passwords and other personal information in your browser,
including your address, phone number and payment-card details, saves you a lot of time when signing into websites and filling in online forms. But though it’s convenient to auto-fill these details, the fact they aren’t encrypted makes them available to anyone with access to your device or user profile.
Manually removing this data from all your browsers will boost your privacy and security, but it’s also a bit of a hassle, which is where Privacy Eraser comes in handy. Simply tick the boxes AutoFill Form History and Saved Passwords (see screenshot) for each of your browsers to delete the information in your next clean-up. This will prevent the data from auto-filling but also stop it being stolen and reused. Click ‘Yes’ if the program warns you that all your saved passwords will be cleared.
In PrivaZer, you’ll find the option to delete ‘Saved passwords’ in the ‘Internet browsing’ section (see previous tip) – select ‘Typed info’ to remove other auto-fill data. Alternatively, click the Options button on the home screen and keep clicking Next until you reach the ‘Internet browsers – Autocomplete histories’ screen.
In the ‘Remove autocomplete histories’ section, choose ‘Yes (recommended for privacy)’ to delete saved form data.