Total Privacy: InPrivate Browsing and Filtering
The privacy techniques you’ve seen so far suffer from a complete of glaring problems:
They work after the fact—
For example, if you’ve visited a site with sensitive data, you delete
your browsing history after you leave the site. This is a problem
because you might forget to delete your history.
They’re all or nothing— When you delete format data, passwords, history, cookies, or the cache files, you delete all
of them (unless you preserve the cookies and cache files for your
favorites). This is a problem because you often want to remove the data
for only a single site or a few sites.
Fortunately,
Internet Explorer 8 implements a single new feature that solves both
problems: InPrivate browsing. When you activate this feature, Internet
Explorer stops storing private data when you visit websites. It no
longer saves temporary Internet files, cookies, browsing history, form
data, and passwords. Here’s how this solves the privacy problems I
mentioned earlier:
It works before the fact—
By turning on InPrivate browsing before you visit a site, you don’t
have to worry about deleting data afterward because no data is saved.
It works only while it’s on— When
you activate InPrivate browsing and surf some private sites, no data is
stored, but all your other privacy data remains intact. When you then
deactivate InPrivate browsing, Internet Explorer resumes saving privacy
data.
To
use InPrivate browsing, select Safety, InPrivate Browsing (or press
Ctrl+Shift+P). Internet Explorer opens a new browser window as shown in
Figure 5. Notice two things in this window that tell you InPrivate browsing is activated:
A
similar idea is InPrivate filtering. When you visit a website, it’s
possible that the site loads some of its content from a third-party
provider. It could be an ad, a map, a YouTube video, or an image.
That’s not a terrible thing once in a while, but if a particular
third-party company provides data for many different sites, that
company could conceivably build up a profile of your online activity.
What
InPrivate filtering does is watch out for these third-party providers
and track the data they provide. If the InPrivate feature detects that
a third-party site is providing data quite often to the sites you
visit, InPrivate will begin blocking that site’s content so that it
can’t build up a profile of your activity.
InPrivate filtering is off by default. To turn it on, select Safety, InPrivate Filtering (or press Ctrl+Shift+F).
