Internet Tips: Protect Yourself--Clear Your Cookies and History

Cookies are a threat to your privacy, though not in the way you probably think. The cookie files that Web sites use to personalize your online experience aren't immune to online snoops. But they're much more likely to reveal your surfing habits, shopping preferences, and private yearnings to nosy coworkers, kids, system administrators, and bosses who may poke around in your computer while you're momentarily away.

To uncover the secrets that your cookies reveal in Internet Explorer 6, choose Tools, Internet Options and--under the General tab--click the Settings button in the 'Temporary Internet files' area. In the Settings dialog box, click the View Files button. In either Mozilla 1.1 or Netscape 7, choose Tools, Cookie Manager, Manage Stored Cookies (see FIGURE 1). In Netscape 6.2, choose Edit, Preferences, select Cookies under the Privacy & Security category, and then click the View Stored Cookies button to open the Cookie Manager.

You may be a little surprised at the information you'll find: cookies containing URLs to racy magazines, job-seeking sites, shopping sites, and other revealing destinations. Fortunately, removing an individual unwanted cookie is easy. In IE, right-click the cookie's name in the Temporary Internet Files window you opened above, and choose Delete. To remove all cookies, choose Tools, Internet Options and click the Delete Cookies button. In Netscape, select a cookie in the Stored Cookies list and click the Remove Cookie button. You can erase all your cookies by clicking the Remove All Cookies button.

You're not finished yet, though. All browsers keep a history of all the URLs you've visited. To remove individual history items in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, or Netscape, press Ctrl-H to open the History Explorer Bar and right-click a history site domain name, an individual page URL, or an entire day's or week's worth of browsing history in the list. Now choose Delete. To erase all history entries in IE, choose Tools, Internet Options and click the Clear History button.

To accomplish the same thing in Netscape/Mozilla, click Edit, Preferences, select History under the Navigator category, and click the Clear History button.

In Netscape browsers, however, you must take an additional step: Choose Edit, Preferences, select History under the Navigator category, and then click the Clear Location Bar button.