Cover your tracks with Internet Explorer's inPrivate Feature

Internet Explorer 8 comes with a whole new load of features, many with a view of protecting the browser's safety. One of the most pertinent in these times is the inPrivate feature. By setting up an InPrivate setting in Internet Explorer, you can browse Web sites without retaining cookies or leaving behind browsing history.

To enable InPrivate filtering all that is required is to click on the "Saftey" button and make sure that the "InPrivate Filtering" feature is enabled.

Controlling the InPrivate Feature

You will discover that if you consistently use the InPrivate feature in your own computer, Internet Explorer 8 will begin to recognize the type and frequency of content which appears on the websites that you visit. This is helpful if you want IE to develop a sense of your browsing habits, something that allows it to load pages faster by caching frequently viewed data.

Of course, you may not want Internet Explorer to do this. To control whether or not InPrivate tracks your tendencies, go to…

1. Tools

2. Then click on Internet Options

3. When the Internet Options dialog opens, click on the Privacy Tab

4. At the bottom, you'll see two checkboxes for InPrivate

Click the first box, and you tell Internet Explorer to not collect any data.

Click the second box to actively disable all of the toolbars and extentions that you normally use. Most toolbars and extensions are helpful, but usually they're designed to track your web bahavior so that they can create targeted advertising. InPrivate gives you the ability to temporarly turn these devices off but keep them installed. When you exit InPrivate Browsing, the toolbars and extensions are back to normal.

Viewing the InPrivate Collected Data

If you let InPrivate cache data for more customized browsing, you can view the data it collects any time by going to…

1. Tools

2. Manage Addons

3. On the left are a bank of options, one of which is the InPrivate Filtering. Click on that.

4. Here you can view, manage, and even delete cached data.

Based on the information InPrivate gathered, you can decide to block websites that show the information that you don't want to see or come back to haunt you in the future.