Can Your Searches Be Used Against You? How To Erase Your Search History in Firefox
Saturday November 12, 2005
Apparently so. In this story from
CNET News.com, a man on trial for the murder of his wife actually had Google searches introduced into the state's evidence.
And on that note, purely for academic purposes and not to encourage anyone who might be considering foul play:
How To Erase Your Search History in Firefox
- If you have any toolbars installed, i.e., the Google toolbar or the Yahoo search toolbar, you'll need to uninstall them since they keep their own records of your search history. If you are using Windows, go to Start, Control Panel, Add and Delete Programs, and then scroll down to the name of the program you want to delete.
- In Firefox, go to Tools, then Options, then Privacy, then History. Click "Clear."
- This will only erase your browsing history for the past ten days. You also can clear everything, and I mean EVERYTHING (cache, cookies, history) by clicking on the button at the bottom of the pop-up Privacy window marked "Clear All."
Comments
All this is good information for clearing up simple privacy issues where you don’t want a casual look-see to reveal something merely embarassing or trivial.
At a bare minimum, never use a computer to commit a crime. Ever. Get that? Never use a computer to commit a crime if you want to cover your tracks.
Here’s why? First off, simple deletion of a file is the change of the first character of the file name and a release of the sectors in the file to be overwritten. If you are using anything with NTFS, and you are dealing with lots of small files, the files are stored in the master file table, not as discrete files and until the entry gets over written, it’s still pretty much there. What does not get over written is still on the drive, not necessarily in an easily recoverable form, but then all plain text is easily readable. And what does not get completely overwritten when a file is written over the released sectors, remains in the slack space, the difference between the actual data in the file and the storage space contained in the number number of sectors required to store the file.
Ok, wise guy, think you’re going to use one of those fancy evidence eliminators to cover your pron research? Let me wipe the tears from my eyes and recover my breath. The really poor ones do really dumb stuff like simply deleting the folder where Internet Explorer stores its cache. A simple pass with Ontrack reveals and restores these directories along with their compromising and embarassing files. OOPs!! At least with Firefox, the files are stored with some sort of hash for the name so it isn’t so readily obvious, however; if the files are recoverable, then your career isn’t.
Umm, so you get wise and decide to wipe your drive along with the slack space? Well, you are only innocent until proven guilty in criminal law courts, doesn’t much have to do with civil law when you’ve signed the employee handbook where it explicitly outlines what is and is not tolerated on the company computers, so if you’ve got time to waste wiping your drive to eliminate evidence, you seriously are not devoting time to getting your work done.
And even if you get really good at wiping all this, then be assured that there is some computer in the back room logging all internet access? Especially if you are SarBoxed…
good article, but my search history was not cleared, even with the “clear all” option.