This is easy, right? Just start Chrome in incognito mode and you are done. Not so! You are still leaving a trace of your browsing session behind. In this 2 part series I will tell you how to get rid of any of them for a truly private browsing.
Why Do I Care?
There are a lot of reasons why you want to browse in private:
- You are sharing a computer and you don’t want other people knows where have you been.
- Browse on a laptop which you travel with – This actually can get people into a lot of trouble. In most countries (including US) the custom areas are excluded from the civil right law. In other words the custom agent can search a person’s laptop without any legal justification. You will have a lot of explanation to do if they find “questionable material” in you browser’s cache. For example, you donated some money to a Pro-Tibet web site before you visit China.
Caution
The instruction here assumes you have a direct connection to the Internet and may not protect you in a company environment. Most enterprise environment use a proxy server to offload the network traffic and a firewall server to protect its network. Those servers usually have build in tracking function and require additional setup to bypass. I will cover how to do it in part 2 of this series.
Why Private Mode fail?
Private mode only cleans up your browser history and cache. Your operating system continues to store more information about what you’ve been up to, like cached DNS lookups and Flash cookies that don’t get wiped. Any semi-technical people can easily reconstruct our browse history from those tid bits of information.
Problem #1: DNS Entries
Every time you browse to a web page, your PC has to request the IP Address for that web site from your default DNS server. The OS will keep a copy of the information locally to speed up the connection.
On a Windows base machine, you can see these for yourself by opening up a command prompt and typing in ipconfig /displaydns to see the full list of cached DNS entries. Cleaning the cache is easy, just type in ipconfig /flushdns to wipe everything.
Problem #2: Everything else
DNS Entries is not a big deal but the rest of your computer software are. Take Adobe Flash Player as an example, It keeps track of the site you have visited. Telling anybody with access to your machine that you have been watching video from GirlsVsDonkey.tv may not an interesting experience. If you don’t believe me just head to the directory %appdata%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects directory and see it yourself.
CCleaner is the best tools to use to clean up all those secret data. Once you installed CCleaner, go to Cleaner Section and click the Applications tab. Double check and make sure all the check boxes are checked.
Putting everything together
Knowing all of the above won’t help a bit if you are not going to use it. Here is simple batch file which will automate the process for you.
cmd /c “<your Chrome Install Path>\chrome.exe” -incognito
cmd /c “<your CCleaner Install Path>\CCleaner.exe /AUTO”
cmd /c “ipconfig /flushdns”
Cut and paste the text into a editor and put in the install path of your copy of Chrome and CCleaner; save the file as “PrivatBrowse.bat”. Just launch the batch file next time you want to browse the internet in private.
What next?
In the next part I will tell you how to bypass firewall and proxy server in most corporate and education network.
