Erase ALL Your PRIVATE DATA

Remove personal data from your PC to prevent others from seeing it. Robert Irvine explains how to remove all trace of your activities using two free tools

-  Robert Irvine

ANYONE WHO WANTS to know what you’ve been doing on your computer—both online and offline—can find out in just a matter of seconds. Your PC stores details of all your Windows and web activities, including the files you open, the sites you visit, and the software you use, and makes this information easy for you to access. However, this also makes it easy for others to access, which significantly compromises your privacy, even if you have nothing to hide.

Manually deleting personal data from all the programs you use can be time-consuming and confusing, and traces of your activities are inevitably left behind, allowing savvy snoopers to see exactly what you’ve been up to. To completely erase all these elements so they can’t be recovered, you need a dedicated privacy cleaner. Thankfully there are two excellent free tools available.

Privacy Eraser (www.cybertronsoft. com/) and PrivaZer (privazer.com/en/ index.php) will both purge your PC of all private data and leftover traces, including temporary files, tracking cookies, and usage logs.

In this feature, we reveal the options you can use in both programs to perform the most thorough clean-up possible and hide all details of your activities from prying eyes. We’ll explain which boxes you need to tick, where to find them, and how to ensure you don’t erase more—or less— data than you intend.

ERASE WHAT YOU DO IN WINDOWS

Recently opened files and programs