Covering your tracks

Exit site button

The red ‘Leave This Site’ button on the right of the page will quickly hide the page, but you will still need to delete your history fully cover your tracks.

Private ‘safe’ browsing

All leading web browsers have a ‘private browsing’ mode that, once enabled, stores nothing about your activity on your computer in that browsing window.

This won’t stop online services from seeing what you get up to, but it won’t leave any traces of your activity on your computer (no history, web cache or anything else) and so it’s always a useful first step to take.

Internet Explorer

Go to Safety – Tools – ‘InPrivate Browsing’.

Firefox

Click the “Menu” button with three horizontal lines – ‘New Private Window’.

Google Chrome

Click the Menu button with three horizontal lines and select ‘New Incognito Window’.

Other browsers

Similar options can be found in Opera and Safari.

Deleting history

Internet browsers keep a record of all the web pages you visit. This is known as a ‘history’.

To delete history for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox, hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard, then press the H key (Ctrl, Alt and H for Opera). Find any entries that you want to hide, right click and choose Delete.

On Safari, click on the open book emblem at the bottom of your internet screen, swipe the link(s) you want to delete from your history, and hit the red ‘Delete’ button.

Cookies

It may not be best to delete your ‘cookies’, as this could alert your partner that things have been hidden – especially if on a shared device.

If all cookies are deleted, previously saved passwords for websites are forgotten by the device, which could make a partner suspicious that you have been hiding your online activity.