Women’s Counselling Centre

Hiding Your Internet Tracks

In some cases, women in abusive relationships are concerned about their abuser tracking their internet activities. There are ways in which you can hide your internet tracks so that no one is able to see the websites you have viewed.

How to Erase Your Tracks

Concerned about someone finding out where you’ve been on the internet? Here’s how to reduce the chances that your internet travels will be traced.
Browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox are designed to leave traces behind, indicating where you’ve been and what you’ve been looking at on the internet.
It’s hard to absolutely guarantee that your travels on the Internet can’t be traced at all, but here are some simple things you can do to reduce the chances of someone being able to look through your computer and find out what you’ve been reading.

In general, you want to erase two things:

Erase your Cache (this is where the computer stores copies of files you’ve recently looked at with your browser).

Erase your History List (this is a single file containing the addresses of the places you’ve recently visited).

If you use Internet Explorer:

Open the TOOLS menu, select INTERNET OPTIONS.
Select the GENERAL tab at the top.
In the section called “Temporary Internet Files,” click on: “Delete Files”.
Your cache will now be cleared.
On the same screen, in the section called “History,” click on “Clear History”
Your history list will now be cleared.
Note that clearing the Cache and history in Internet Explorer automatically clears your address bar.

If you use Firefox:

Open the TOOLS menu, select OPTIONS.
Select the PRIVACY tab located on the left side of the menu bar.
Select the “History” tab and click on “Clear”.
Your history will now be cleared.
Select the “Cache” tab and click on “Clear”.
Your cache will now be cleared.
Note that clearing the cache and history in Firefox automatically clears your address bar as well.

If you are using any Browser:

There is also another option called “Clear all information stored while browsing.” ***
***This will remove ALL of your browsing history, cache, recently downloaded files, all saved information and searches, all cookies and saved passwords.***
Select this tab and “Click OK.”
You will get a pop up to confirm that you are about to erase all information. “Click OK.”

One additional but important tip:

When you clear the cache and the history list, you erase not only the information on where you have been, but any other information that had been previously stored there.
So, if your partner checks and sees that the cache and the history lists have been completely emptied, they will not only know that you know how to do this, but they might guess that you are trying to hide something.
One possible way to avoid suspicion is to clear the cache and history once you are done looking at information you do not want your partner to know about. After they are cleared, spend some time visiting sites that you think your partner would not object to. This way, the cache and history list start to get filled up and your partner might be less likely to notice that old information is missing.

Other browsers:

Other browsers will be slightly different in the details of what’s required to do these two things. But in any case, what you will need to do is clear your cache (or “temporary files”) and erase your history list. Again, this does not guarantee that your browsing cannot be traced. Someone with greater computer sophistication will still be able to reconstruct your internet travels. However, these are good things to do to make it more difficult for someone to be able to track where you have been.