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private browsing states ''While this computer won't have a record of your browsing history, your internet service provider or employer can still track the pages you visit.'' Is this true from my home too? or just at work

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  • Igcine ukuphendulwa ngu Christof

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private browsing states While this computer won't have a record of your browsing history, your internet service provider or employer can still track the pages you visit. Is this true from my home too? or just at work

private browsing states ''While this computer won't have a record of your browsing history, your internet service provider or employer can still track the pages you visit.'' Is this true from my home too? or just at work

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Yep, that is absolutely true for any computer. When you load a webpage, your computer goes through several computers to get to the webpage, including your ISP, router, etc. Any one of those computers could record what webpages you visited.

Private Browsing just makes sure that your computer doesn't know what webpages you visited.

If you want more privacy, try using a proxy. When you use a proxy, your computer, instead of telling your router, isp, etc. to go to the website that you want to go to, it tells them to take you a proxy, which is another computer. Your computer then tells the proxy to take you to the website that you want to go to, which the proxy does.

What the proxy just did for you is limit who has access to who you are and what website you are visiting. The ISP and related computers on your end don't know what website you are actually visiting. The ISP and related computers on the proxies end don't know who is really visiting the website.

However, the proxy knows, and the proxy could easily track the webpages that you visit. And if your ISP finds out that you are using a proxy, they would probably put more effort into monitoring your Internet access. Your ISP needs to make sure that you aren't doing anything illegal, and if you are using a proxy, they would think that you have something to hide.

If you are interested in using a proxy, try some of these add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fire.../?q=proxy&cat=all&x=0&y=0

If you are interested in more protection, try TOR (http://www.torproject.org/). TOR is like a proxy, only a billion times more powerful. With TOR, it is virtually impossible for anyone to find out who you are, or what webpage you are using. TOR has two downsides: webpages can take more than a minuet to load with it, and your ISP will certainly think that it is suspicious that you are using TOR, and you will probably get an FBI computer program monitoring your Internet access.

Your best bet is to do what I do: nothing. Your ISP also has to monitor millions of other messages and they simply do not have the capacity to look at them all. At work, my advice is not to do anything that you wouldn't want your boss to find out. At work, they can simply look over your shoulder.

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Thanks for the in depth answer to my questions. Very helpful. My concern is my company tracking my activities from my home. I don't have Internet access at work. So my concern is only with my employer tracking my website activities at home. This all came up when I was visiting a number of competitor's websites from my home computer I noticed that every time I viewed a competitors site; in the lower left corner on the foxfire browser it would state "transferring data from xxx.com". So I just want to make sure my company cannot track my activities on my home computer.

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Your company can track your activities when working at home

  • Only if you are connecting to the internet through their servers when at home
  • When you reconnect to your your company's servers with the same computer that was used at home, they may see (if they look) your cookies and other history stored on that computer
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Your welcome :)

If you use Private Browsing, then your employer won't be able to look at your history/cookies is you use the same computer at work and home, unless they really dug through your computer (which they wont: it takes much more time and money than it's worth).