# I'm not having an EA or a PA but still want privacy!



## Advocado (Feb 24, 2010)

For example, a while back I found a lump (thankfully turned out to be benign) and didn't want to worry my spouse about it straight away and did some research on the net first. I’m wondering if I am the only one on here that thought that deleting history for certain websites was enough to protect my privacy from my spouse. 

Further, I don't have anything to hide from my spouse in terms of EAs or PAs but I still do value my privacy. If I'm trying to work through a problem to better my relationship I don't want my spouse to necessarily know my innermost thoughts, feelings and fears before I'm completely ready to share. For me it's more a question of PRIVACY than secrecy – So, 

1.) I've read up on how to delete history and cache and have tried it out and my history is gone. However, how do I check and see if my cache is gone too? (Browser is Mozilla, Firefox - don't know which version I'm afraid). 

2.) That said, I read somewhere that even if history and cache are deleted EVERYTHING is still stored on the computer's hard disk and this can never be deleted and is therefore accessible to anyone with the know-how.. Is this correct? 

3.) Given No. 2 above, how do I view my own cache/info stored on the hard drive and also how can I view cache/info stored on the hard drive (or just cache) for other users? (To explain, if others have the option to view which websites etc I have visited, it would make me feel better to know that I know how to view their cache/info stored on hard drive also, should I ever feel the need).


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## pulse (Mar 24, 2010)

I hope this gets some replies - any computer whizz-kids out there?


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## plymouth71 (May 10, 2010)

Hi pulse - I don't have any technical advice for you but I share some of your privacy concerns. My best advice would be to use a different computer. Pop down to the library with the kids and send them off for some Clifford books while you look up webMD.

Maybe that's not very helpful. Why do you want to keep your medical concerns from your spouse? I did try that once and the results in lost trust were pretty awful.
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## Susan2010 (Apr 19, 2010)

Advocado said:


> 2.) That said, I read somewhere that even if history and cache are deleted EVERYTHING is still stored on the computer's hard disk and this can never be deleted and is therefore accessible to anyone with the know-how.. Is this correct?


Yes, that is correct, and it's the way police retrieve evidence from a computer after things have been deleted. I also remember back in Windows 3.1 and 95 many times I deleted something by accident, and my technician retrieved them for me in DOS. There is no actual DOS now as far as I understand it, but you can go into to DOS through Windows and conduct those same commands. 

However, I don't think the second part of your question is true. I asked once on a computer forum how to permanently delete files as part of a similar discussion as this one. I was directed to another website that shows how. Only I didn't do it because the instructions seemed too involved and too advanced for me to chance. I had no reason to do it and only asked out of curiosity. So, there was no real motivation, only disappointment that I chickened out LOL and never learned how to do it. Sorry I don't remember those sites, but I'm sure you can google and find computer forums that can help you if no one here can.


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## WantsHappiness (Jun 17, 2009)

It’s true that it gets stored on your hard drive even after you delete it. I was looking into recycling our old computers and wanted to remove all of the personal information before doing so. I checked out numerous computer forums and was told the same thing you have stated here; you can’t really permanently remove the data. Everything that you delete is still on that hard drive somewhere and doesn’t go away until enough memory is used that the computer has to overwrite the deleted data in order to keep functioning which will basically never happen because you will never use every gigabyte (or megabyte or whatever) of space on your computer. Some will get overwritten, naturally, but not everything. 

As for retrieving that information, I don't know how but I would think that it takes someone who is extremely tech savvy to do so. Interested in additional replies you receive because I have three old and unusable computers sitting here that I’d really like to get rid of 

BTW, I believe Firefox is programmed so that every time you close the browser it automatically clears your cache.


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## RestlessInGeorgia (Dec 3, 2008)

@WantsHappiness - What you stated is true to a point. You can successfully remove data from a hard drive where it is no longer accessible even by programs that the FBI uses to retrieve data, but it requires a special program. These programs write data over erased sectors over and over again until the data is no longer recognizable by any computer. Here is a link to an article regarding this. It references the Secure Erase method, but what you are looking for is also referenced. How to REALLY erase a hard drive | ZDNet


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## scarletblue (May 20, 2009)

Interesting question, but it raises another question for me. Did I understand you that you want to erase data from your hard drive permenantly so no one can view it, but you want to be able to view data that others using the computer have erased?

It sounds like you want your privacy, which I understand, but at the same time don't want to allow that same privacy for others?


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## Kobo (May 13, 2010)

If you delete ur files then you're good unless ur husband is really trying to find something. If that's the case he will capture real time and deleting files won't matter. Also, try Google Chrome as a browser and use "incognito mode" 

_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## bartlet (Jun 1, 2010)

I'm a recent CS graduate, so I can shed some more detailed light on your second question. Deleting a file on a computer doesn't remove the actual data, but removes the index that the operating system uses to find the file. In a sense, the OS "forgets" all information about the file: where it's located, how big it is, etc.

In theory, the information in the file could remain indefinitely. Once deleted, the OS treats that space as unused and could overwrite it with new information, but there's no way to know when that might happen, and until it does, the information stored in the deleted file remains where it was. I've never tried to recover a deleted file, but I'm sure it's not easy. Worrying about it seems excessive, since this is only your spouse we are talking about. They would have to be both very good with computers and suspicious enough to take the time to dig through all the blank space on the computer for some hint of a file that might contain relevant information.


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## WantsHappiness (Jun 17, 2009)

RestlessInGeorgia said:


> @WantsHappiness - What you stated is true to a point. You can successfully remove data from a hard drive where it is no longer accessible even by programs that the FBI uses to retrieve data, but it requires a special program. These programs write data over erased sectors over and over again until the data is no longer recognizable by any computer. Here is a link to an article regarding this. It references the Secure Erase method, but what you are looking for is also referenced. How to REALLY erase a hard drive | ZDNet


Fantastic article, thank you for this clarification and information!!


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## Advocado (Feb 24, 2010)

Very informative and helpful replies. BIG thanks to everyone who has posted coz as a result I’m much clearer about what is and is not delete-able and that, for my purposes, I only want to delete cache and history for certain websites (e.g. TAM). 

I’ve been able to delete selected items from history but wonder if it is possible to delete just selected items from cache, or do I have to delete all my cache?

I guess in the first instance, I need to be able to VIEW cache in order to select the items I want to delete but I can’t find how to view cache. I’m expecting it to display in a similar format to history but haven’t been able to find anything like this. I did a little research which said to type “about:cache” in the address bar but what then appeared looked nothing like history and TAM wasn’t there, so I think I was looking in the wrong place. :scratchhead:

Any guidance would again be appreciated.


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## Advocado (Feb 24, 2010)

Kobo said:


> If you delete ur files then you're good unless ur husband is really trying to find something. If that's the case he will capture real time and deleting files won't matter."


Kobo - could you please explain what is meant by "capture real time". I'm wondering if it is something related to like when I've had a fault on my computer at work and a technician can log on remotely and fix the problem without being present and you see the mouse seemingly moving by itself across the screen and clicking etc.


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## michzz (Jun 6, 2008)

There are utilities that allow for deleting and wiping clean the "unused" space on your hard drive.

Just deleting a file from the operating system is not enough if you are worried about that kind of thing.

I buy computers on ebay or craigslist and am continually amazed that people do not even bother deleting their user accounts.

Music, email, pictures, etc.


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## Kobo (May 13, 2010)

Advocado said:


> Kobo - could you please explain what is meant by "capture real time". I'm wondering if it is something related to like when I've had a fault on my computer at work and a technician can log on remotely and fix the problem without being present and you see the mouse seemingly moving by itself across the screen and clicking etc.



I am talking about things like key loggers/spyware. These apps will just send the info to email so deleting your history won't help because the your activities have been recorded as they occur.


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## Advocado (Feb 24, 2010)

Thanks Kobo


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## Anooniemouse (May 5, 2010)

You do know that Mozilla (the group that puts out Firefox) has a technical forum for exactly this type of question?

Firefox Support • mozillaZine Forums

You can find out the version of Firefox you are using by going to Help>About Firefox. 

Since the 3.x series of Firefox they have had "Private Browsing" mode, which doesn't store image files, cookies, a url history, or any of that on the hard drive. You can get to that by pressing Control-Shift-P, or Tools>Enable Private Browsing. (Internet explorer version 8.0 also has a private browsing mode, as does Google Chrome -- though theirs is very slow). 

If you want to access the cache you can do that by typing "about:cache" in the url window, and that will list the items viewable in cache. 

While its true that a small amount of information is still cached to the hard drive (for windows memory management), this generally isn't in a form that is useful for anyone to determine your browsing history. If you are really concerned about that kind of thing, you can invest in a little bit more memory for your computer, some ramdisk software, and move the windows cache, and even your browser cache to the ramdisk (and then its gone the second you turn the computer off). 

Another big security hole is stored login information/passwords. If you use that feature, those sites are going to be retrievable that you have visited if the right software is applied. (IE stores these in the Windows Registry -- just in case you were curious. I'm not sure where Firefox does, but they are retrievable if you don't set a master password for your account from within Firefox itself.)

You might also want to be aware that if you have a gmail account, or Google toolbar that you may have enabled storage of your search terms unintentionally, and anyone who knows your gmail password can access that quite easily. 

----
To some degree I have the same issues you do. My SO made an offhanded comment to me one day that could only have been raised by a good deal of snooping around, and it got me thinking that I needed to know the type of person I was dealing with. So I designed a test to measure her propensity to snoop by leaving a window open, logged in, and turning logging on. She obsessively went through every piece of email on my machine she could get access to, and even used it to retrieve a password for a site I visited occasionally. I respected the effort. 

I wasn't put off by this. In an odd way I felt a lot better since she wanted to pry to know more about me. Since I knew about it, and knew her propensity to pry, and some of her anxiety issues I did something very left handed: I put all of the accounts for my email, im, social networking, and many boring technical sites with passwords, and login names on a card in my wallet in the section where the money, and receipts go; so I knew she would find it. I'm sure she has them by now, and can browse them on her computer at her leisure. Security through openness. 

Anything I want to keep private, I simply have sent to another set of email addresses I created after, and I came up with a completely new set of passwords. Anything I truly want private that needs to be stored, I encrypt into a hidden volume, and if uber paranoid about it, put it on portable storage marked as porn or something else I know she'll want to look at. I use private browsing occasionally when it suits my needs. I figure she'll get bored with the checking up on phase sooner or later, and that it makes her feel better to think she has that in her bag of tricks for later. 

For the opposite problem: How to track activity. 

If everyone uses their own accounts this works out great:

Microsoft gave a fairly useful tool for parents in the form of parental controls. If you have windows Vista, or Windows 7, and have administrator access, you have a fairly good set of tracking tools. You can simply turn on logging under parental controls. It came with the OS. Its also fairly decent at keeping your kids off of pr0n sites...It didn't stop my 10 year old from bypassing it by logging onto grandma's computer to visit pornhub though.  If they do their browsing somewhere else, it wont help you. 

Its not completely transparent. Any account with administrator access can find out its turned on for their account, but the reports are only sent to the account that enabled it by default.  It will keep a log of what software is installed on the computer, what software is accessed, every time an administrator override is required, and does a fair job of tracking site viewing with a very simple report that gives you the most viewed, most visited, last sites visited. Its also useful for figuring out what the heck people did to break things when fixing technical problems. (I really hate the "I didn't install anything new" line when I CAN go check...) The handy thing is, you can be lazy with it, and don't even have to log out of your own account to use it. Just check the report, and done. 

Other methods:

You can dig through the history yourself, but I prefer to look at cookies, and stored passwords (IE stores login names, and passwords the in the windows registry in several different places for those that are truly curious where it puts them). The browser cache is also useful for a run through, but its better for finding things like porn than finding the sites they came from at times. 

If I really want to be nosy, I could just mirror the router, and I can watch traffic in real time. (You need a little better than a consumer router for this most of the time...) My network, my rules. Believe it or not, most of the traffic goes out in plain text, even from major IM services. I block certain types of traffic at the router level to keep the kids off of certain sites & services that are problematic, but I can also choose to log this traffic at the router level as well. If you control the network, other than encrypted traffic routed though a proxy server -- you can have a good idea what is going on in the network if you know what to look for in a good router, and how to set it up. Not worth the time involved, but if you want to geek out its easy enough to do. This is how they do most monitoring in work environments, and its very effective for network traffic. 

While there is software out there that can go deeper than this, its use straddles the wiretap laws. I don't employ conversation logging for IM's, or keystroke recording, as it runs into wiretap laws. Not even for the kids. I simply block the protocols I don't want at the router level for their machines, and have a short interval for the automatic lockout for the other computers in the house to keep them off of our accounts. 

I have very little interest in what she does with the PCs, other than to mine. My square headed Medusa girlfriend is mine alone...my precious...  If they have physical access to the machine, any security effort you do is largely meaningless if they *really* want to know. That being said, if its something like your own laptop that isn't shared, a boot password is a good idea. (You can set this in the BIOS, and its a good idea to set a BIOS password at the same time, and lock out booting off of DVD/CD/Flashdrive/Network). This cuts down greatly on the ability of anyone to install software without your permission, or noticing. Just don't forget those passwords. You have to take the laptop apart to reset them!


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## Advocado (Feb 24, 2010)

Wow Anooniemouse! - thanks so much for the effort and insight in your reply. It will take me a while to digest it all and gives lots of food for thought for everybody.

It's interesting what you say about your SO, satisfying her curious nature and the fact that you were not offended by her wanting to know more about you. When I've read on infidelity type posts about each spouse knowing the other's passwords etc and how much importance is placed on this, I've always been miffed as to how this how this could really help, when all the wayward one has to do for example is create a new e-mail address and keep that new one secret!

However, as you know from the title of my thread, my priority is privacy not secrecy. Thus far the only change I've made is to delete my History/SavedFromSearchHistory/Cache/Cookies/OfflineWebSiteData/AuthenticatedSessions (i.e. ticked all these boxes) each time I exit a session. I'm a little scared of messing up the whole system if I try to do much more, whereupon I'll need to go begging to my spouse to rectify same LOL! Given all this, would you say deleting history/cache etc will suffice? Alternatively, if you were in my position with limited confidence/ability where computers are concerned is there perhaps one more thing you would do and on a scale of 1 to 10, how difficult is it for a novice.

Thanks again


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## Anooniemouse (May 5, 2010)

What you need is a quick, and dirty solution that is easy. Not a problem. If you do these three things you can skip the rest of the routine, and life will be easier. 

Step 1) Set a master password for stored passwords in Firefox. Tools>Options>Security>Master Password (Pick something you will remember, this isn't easy to retrieve if you forget it.)

Step 2) Browse the sites you want to in privacy with private browsing mode in Firefox (or IE if that is your bag, I like Firefox's private browsing mode a little better.). Then you don't have to worry about cache, cookies, history, or any of that so long as you do your private browsing in that window/tab. Just remember you have to enable it every time you use it. If you followed step 1, you can keep the convenience features of stored passwords in Firefox, and not have much to worry about. 

Step 3) Buy a Flash drive. These days 4-8GB flash drives are under $20. Anything that you need to save, and keep private, save it to the flash drive, but encrypt it first. (I suggest a very simple encryption tool like Axcrypt. Its free, open source, and very easy to use.) Put the flash drive somewhere its unlikely to be found, but don't worry much if you encrypted the data, and didn't use obvious file names for topics. These drives are tiny, and easy to hide. 

Short of your SO installing monitoring software of your computer it should be sufficient. 

I don't have much I need to hide from her, but I often take a few days to mull over how I want to handle things with her, her family, her kids, my kids, my folks, friends, coworkers what have you. I keep a diary for my own uses as well, and I very much prefer to keep that private as its contents might create conflicts I would rather not deal with. 

The value of passwords is not so much in the present tense. The real value of passwords is in the future tense; information to be acquired later. Most people are pretty lazy, and tend to be creatures of habit. Even if they change passwords, or create a new account somewhere, knowing previous passwords, and account names likely gives you insight into their process for picking passwords, and you have a higher probability of being able to guess future ones should you be so inclined. People tend to use 1-4 passwords for everything, or create them from the same basic elements. (Something I made sure not to do with mail accounts I prefer to keep private, and I definitely don't do with anything that gets encrypted.) They also tend to be lazy, and to store those passwords on the computer, which makes them easy to retrieve in most cases. 

The prying is something with her that I knew was in her nature. Her prior marriage ended due to infidelity, and by her own words she mentioned that she monitored accounts before, during, and after the divorce. After seeing that tendency to pry firsthand, and knowing she has some anxiety issues ... That is why I essentially gave them to her. I figured it was better to let her discover them on her own thinking I wouldn't know about it, and have that insight if she wanted it. 

She has little to truly be paranoid, or jealous about, but I know her well enough to know she'll sleep more soundly thinking she has that ability. Devious? Yep, but I've seen her spin her wheels when anxiety gets the better of her before, and its not pretty to watch. She can't help that, its just a part of who she is, especially when she is in a period of high stress. (This is something I know will improve when she gets done with her masters degree, but I also know its likely to return.) 

Improve, adapt, and overcome.


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## Advocado (Feb 24, 2010)

Will consider - Cheers Anooniemouse


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## Paperflowers (Jun 14, 2010)

Anooniemouse (btw, I LOVE that name, quite clever) I was just wondering how you know if a keylogger or spyware was installed on your laptop? or how you can check?


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## Anooniemouse (May 5, 2010)

Generally the easiest way to detect a keylogger is to get software that monitors hard disk activity, and lists the processes that are writing to the hard drive. Most keyloggers write to the hard drive every few seconds if there is activity. A lot of other programs also write to the disk, but when you sort through all of the processes, and find out what each one is - you can identity it. I used to have a tool that did this, but its name escapes me at the moment. (Something like Disk Activity Logger, it was free... I'm pretty sure systernals has something like that for free still.) This wouldn't work against something that stores keystrokes purely in memory until it sends it online. For the 2nd type of logger you have to watch network activity, and windows has a built in tool for that called netstat, and set it logging (from the cmd line) the traffic with: netstat -an 5 >filename.txt

(That will pipe the activity of netstat into a file called filename.txt until you press control-C, or close the cmd window.)

I'll get back to you on a more detailed answer when I have a bit more time to play with.


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## Anooniemouse (May 5, 2010)

I asked around a bit, and what most people recommended as far as keystroke recorder, chat recorder, and other general monitoring detection was Spyreveal (which took a lot of the code from Spycop with it when that company changed hands). That is a lot easier for most people to use to find logging programs on your system.


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## SimplyAmorous (Nov 25, 2009)

Wondering where that came from - all 19 posts by Joni119 is exactly the same- trying to promote canadian website.


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