Three ways to keep your activity private

Everyone wants to keep their privacy. Here are some methods to remain as anonymous as possible.



First: Conceal your internet activity. To do that, starts with your browser’s private browsing feature. Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox each have this functionality. That prevents the browser from keeping a history of the pages you view. In Internet Explorer it’s called InPrivate Browsing, in Chrome it’s Incognito mode, and in Firefox it’s simply referred to as a Private Window.

Websites you visit will still have your IP address. So you can take a further step and surf using private browsing in conjunction with Sandboxie.

Finally, there’s Tor. Tor works by having any outgoing or incoming network traffic bounced among many other computers that people have set up to act as nodes in the Tor network.

Second: Create user accounts for each person using the computer. This will keep any file in the C:/Users directory (which includes My Documents, My Photos, and all related folders), accessible only to the user account that created it.

Go a step further and encrypt your info. You can use something like Bitlocker, the full-disk encryption built into the Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Windows 7 and Vista, as well as in the Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows 8. You can turn it on by going to Control Panel > System and Security > Bitlocker Drive Encryption. If you don't have Bitlocker, you can use TrueCrypt.

Third: Use free software like VirtualBox. Nothing you do on the PC in VirtualBox can leave any files on your normal Windows file system. But if you are really paranoid, you can use one last piece of software that provides absolute privacy. It’s called Tails OS, and it’s for when you want to go deep undercover. Its an entire operating system devoted to privacy. You install Tails OS on a DVD or USB drive and run it on any computer you want.