Hiding Your Tracks On-line

But Is Your Partner Likely to Be Monitoring You?
Perpetrators of domestic violence often attempt to control where you go and who you talk to. Not everyone's partner does this to the extreme. But if your partner constantly monitors what you do, to the extent of checking the phone records and tracking the car mileage, then you can assume that s/he does the same with your online existence!

Tracking someone's Internet use doesn't take any special skills, or knowledge only available to computer geeks. Ways of watching people are self-evident to anyone accustomed to thinking like this.

What Can Your Partner Learn?
Firstly, he or she may read all of the email you send and receive, even messages you've attempted to delete. They may also log all use of IRC (Internet Chat) and browse through past conversations at their leisure.

Most important, however, are the records of the webpages you've visited, as this is where we learn much of the information that empowers us. If your partner has access to the computer you are using, then right now he or she has access to the fact that you've been visiting websites about Domestic Violence. If you think this could cause problems, then you should take steps to protect your privacy.

What Can You Do?
Click here for some suggestions for both beginners and more advanced users.

How is this information stored?
Each time you visit a webpage, it is recorded in three different places on your computer: the browser's history, the cache, and the Typed Urls list. Click here for more detail.