Women's Health West

• family violence support
• health information
• community programs
• for service providers
• research and publications
• advocacy and media
• about us
• contact us
• join us
• our site
• links
• events
• home

Using the internet safely: Safe surfing tips

The following material is also available as a fact sheet, available for download (PDF 146 KB).

There are many websites that can help people experiencing family violence. You can find many in our links section. The main safety issue with internet surfing is that all "browsers" – the computer program you use to surf – automatically store information about the websites you have visited on your computer in a variety of ways. This enables someone using that computer to find out what websites you have been visiting, either deliberately or by accident.

Understanding safe surfing requires you to understand a bit about how the internet works. We have tried to make the following tips as simple as possible, however it may help to refer to the glossary.

Use a different browser

The simplest way to protect your surfing privacy is to use a different computer – at a library, work, community centre or friend's house. Another fairly simple way, if you're using the home computer, is to use a different browser. Your computer will probably be set up to automatically use a particular browser; the most frequently-used is Internet Explorer (IE).

There are many other browsers available. Most you can download free, such as Mozilla, Opera or Netscape. It may be a good idea to save the new browser program in a hidden folder somewhere on your computer. The only disadvantage is that will be a bit more hassle to open it – you will have find it again through Windows or your desktop and double-click to open it.

Erase your tracks

To understand how to "erase your tracks" – that is, remove any way for someone to find out what internet sites you have visited – you need to understand how these "tracks" are recorded. When you visit a webpage, it is recorded in three different places on your computer:

• The browser's cache: In order to speed your online viewing, your browser stores copies of every page you visit in a "cache" on your hard drive. When you revisit a page, your computer may display this version instead of reloading the page. In Internet Explorer, the cache is in a folder called "Temporary Internet Files".
  
• The browser's history: Your browser stores the URLs (also known as the "address", for example Women's Health West's address is www.whwest.org.au) of all websites you have recently visited. When a page is displayed, your browser uses this list to determine whether links on that page should be displayed in the normal link colour (usually blue) or the "visited link" colour (often purple). Visited links are links to websites you have recently visited.


• The browser's typed URLs: This is a list of addresses that you have manually typed into the drop-down box on the location bar. An item from this list will "bump" off the end after you have typed 15 to 20 other URLs in that browser.

You can completely clear any of these lists temporarily. How you do it depends on your browser. Below are links to instructions for how to do this in some common browsers. If your browser is not listed, go to its homepage and search on "privacy" or "clear cache".

• Internet Explorer
• Opera
• AOL
• Mozilla
• Netscape

For more information on how browsers work, go to Learn the Net.

Things to remember when erasing your tracks

• Do it regularly: Remember that the cache, history and typed URL lists will begin to grow again as soon as you start visiting more websites.
• Your computer will slow down: Visited links will no longer be a different colour; you won't be able to use the drop-down list to revisit pages; and pages you revisit will take longer to load once their cached versions have been removed.
• "Cookies" will also be removed: removing the cache also means removing "cookies" – log-in passwords, preference information or other data previously entered into a website.

This may have a noticeable effect for other users of the computer. For example, another user may have registered for an online newspaper or chat group. Every time the cache is erased, they may notice that they need to re-enter their password.

It is possible to remove individual items rather than a whole list, but this is quite complex. Search your browser's website if you feel this may help you.

Internet privacy software may be useful

There are a number of "anti-tracks" or programs available, which allow you to automatically erase your cache and history from many popular browsers, as well as erasing data from many other programs such as email.

You can find links to such programs at www.tucows.com – search on "internet privacy". All cost money to download, but some allow a free trial period. Remember that using such a program will affect how the computer operates for everyone who uses it, not just you. Remember also that you may want to hide the program file somewhere.

SAFETY TIPS

Back to main page

General internet safety tips

Using email safely

Glossary