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Our computer
will be recording all our activities like which sites we are visiting, on what documents
we are currently working on, our online chats, which video clips we are seeing etc.
Sometimes this is beneficial to us but sometimes they can create unnecessary mess.
This
recording activity does a great service if we are the only one using our computer.
Because we can quickly open the recently used documents from start menu it self
without going all the way by opening drives.
Also the computer automatically shows
up the whole URL when we type just one letter and repeatedly visited websites load
quickly.
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But if
somebody who really wants to trap our web browsing information, our work, the things
we are interested etc we have to be very careful.
The following are the some of
the places where our computer records all our activities.
Recent documents:
While
using Windows, when we check at Start -> Documents, we find all the recent documents
we have been worked on. Anybody who can log on to our system can easily check the
recent documents we accessed.
If we don’t want anybody to see the documents we recently
accessed, we can delete them from the recent documents in the start menu. This deletion
is going to delete the list of recent documents only but not the original documents
we stored on our drives.
Temporary Internet Files:
These
files contain all the web pages information like links, pictures, sounds we have
visited. Whenever we visit the same page again, the page will be loaded very quickly
as these temporary internet files acts like a cache. We can delete theses files
by following
Internet
Explorer-> Tools-> Internet Options-> General Tab-> Click “Delete files”
button
History:
Internet
History contains the information of all the websites we have visited.
Whenever we
are going to type the address of website we have already visited recently, our computer
shows the whole URL automatically.
This is because of this internet history. We
can delete the internet history by following
Internet
Explorer-> Tools-> Internet Options-> General Tab-> Click “Clear History”
button>
Cookies:
Some
of the websites store cookies on our computers whenever we visit their websites.
So, later if we visit those sites again, they search our hard drive for their stored
cookies. Using these cookies those websites can automatically display a logged in
page for us without asking us to log in. We can delete these cookies by
Internet
Explorer-> Tools-> Internet Options-> General Tab-> Click “Delete Cookies”
button
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Index.dat:
These
are hidden files which act like an active database in Windows operating system and
are very hard to find. These files are primarily used for storing information regarding
websites visited and information about cookies stored on our computer. When operating
system is running, it is always active.
We cannot delete this file manually. These
files contain copies of all stuff like internet history, emails sent or received
through Outlook Express cookies and temporary internet files etc. Even though we
can delete each of them independently, the copies of all of them exist in this file.
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