Most of us have a vague awareness that our computer tracks our progress on the Internet. Now this can be helpful if you want to go back to a site, but it can also lead to great embarrassment, or worse, if a partner or family member stumbles across a questionable website they’ve visited. All they need is to start typing an address in the address bar and the browser will display a list of previously visited sites that start with the same letter. If your partner is actively searching to find your browsing history, the situation is even worse.

It does not have to be an adult website; you may be looking for a medical condition or dating website or any number of sites that your partner would not view favorably.

As much as we share our life with our partner or family, everyone has the right to a certain degree of privacy. Since many families share a computer, it is vital to ensure that your browsing history remains private without you having to think about it.

While it’s perfectly true that you can, to some extent, delete your Internet Explorer history using commands within the browser, it still requires you to remember to follow that process before exiting or shutting down your computer. It only takes one occasion when you forget to perform this procedure to get in trouble. An additional problem is that data that is deleted with the browser or with Windows can still be recovered by someone using data recovery software. If you are concerned about this, then the secure removal that most privacy software offers is a requirement.

Another concern is that many third-party programs store information that will not be erased by the browser. Video players will generally keep a history of watched videos. If your partner opens a video from Real Player, for example, the player will usefully display (for a few seconds) the title of the last played video. Are you comfortable with your partner seeing the title of the last video you watched?

Do you really want to spend 10 minutes at the end of each computer session wiping data from your browser and third-party video players, p2p download, and chat software, to name just a few applications that may retain information that you prefer to keep private?