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TechSpot: Automatically Start Your Browser in 'Private' Mode

People have been making a lot of noise as of late over privacy on the Internet -- and rightfully so. Never before have our personal identities been so broadly exposed. The average web-goer hops from one social infrastructure to the next, leaving behind a humiliating trail of drunken college photos and revealing quizzes that would flush Ron Jeremy's cheeks.


We covered the state of online privacy in a recent mini-series, outlining particulars about covering your tracks on services like Facebook, search engines, and even torrents. Adding to those articles, we thought it'd be handy to provide a short tip explaining how you can automatically start today's most popular browsers in private mode. Note that in Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 5 there is more than one way of doing this, so you only need to choose one of the methods listed.

This feature allows you to browse the Internet without storing local data that could be retrieved at a later date, such as your browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords. Keep in mind that private browsing offers virtually no protection beyond the local level -- for example, the websites you have visited will still be able to view your IP address on the server end and log your activity.

Read: Automatically Start Your Browser in 'Private' Mode

These articles are brought to you in partnership with TechSpot.

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