Computer Protection: Web Evidence

How on earth did they know that about me?!?!

Have you ever wondered how websites can give you product or service recommendations that would actually be of interest to you? With the hundreds and even thousands of products and services that a website can offer, how do they know what you would personally like? Also, how can entire forms be automatically filled out by just simply entering information in one area? Well, information can be collected from you that is not only used for target marketing, but also for other various purposes.

There are tons of places that your computer can store information about you. Some you may be familiar with, such as your cache and your web history, but there are many other places that store information as well when you surf the web. The main purposes for storing this information was to provide the user with some conveniences while browsing. The following are some examples on how and why information is collected from you.

• Cookies: Cookies are simply little text files that websites store on your computer. While they do not store sensitive information such as credit card numbers, they do store mundane information such as what you searched for, what products you clicked on, etc. That way, when you re-visit that website, it can quickly find the cookie it put on your computer to inform you about product deals, recommendations and the like that may be of interest to you. This is a way of personalizing the browsing experience for every user, making the website unique for each individual.
• AutoComplete: Yet, another convenience for the user. Have you ever been asked to save form information after entering it in for the first time? Then, when you go to re-enter it, it automatically fills out everything for you, dotting every i and crossing every t? Yup, that's not just a cool coincidence, it was information that was stored on your computer.
• Cache: You ever notice that it can take a long time for a website to fully load, but when you go back to it, it loads almost instantaneously? This is where the Cache comes in. The cache saves every webpage, picture, song, video, etc. (to an extent) to your computer so that you can quickly view them upon revisiting the website.
• History: When you type a website address into your address bar, you probably noticed that a list of websites pop up that you recently visited that match what you are typing in. This is good for those situations when you stumble into a cool website but forget its address. If you know just a little of the website, your computer will quickly allow you to find that glorious website again. This feature has helped us many times!

Then, there are the other places that your computer stores information about you, primarily in what is called your profile or index.dat. These areas can store information about you such as those found in your cookies, autocomplete, cache and history sections. The only problem is that if you know how to manually clean up your cookies, autocomplete forms, cache and history, you probably will not delete the information stored in your profile or in your index.dat.

Eliminating evidence on your computer can be done in both a manual way and an automatic way. Personally, we perform the latter because, well, we are lazy and they can get things that we may forget about. We will not be discussing how to manually remove evidence here because there are a lot of areas to cover and manually eliminating evidence is different for every browser. That would just take way too long to write out!

Make sure to take a look at our recommended web evidence elimination tool.  It will not only wipe clean evidence that other software may miss, but it also does everything automatically without having to worry about it.