Advanced Surfing 
Tips & Tricks: Privacy, Security, and Plug-Ins
Contents
Privacy & security
Concerned about your privacy? In the process of providing easy backward
referencing, your browser also may compromise your privacy if you share
your computer with other users.
Key areas:
- bookmarks / favorites
- history file
- location pulldown
- cache
- copies of any sent or received e-mail messages
Cookies: are files written by the server and stored on your computer.
They contain site specific information and can generally only be read by
the server that wrote them. Both browsers default to accepting cookies.
To see how frequent cookies are being set, change your preference setting to warn.
Show anatomy/location of cookie. ....program files\netscape\users\(profile)\cookies.txt
Show anatomy/location of cookie. ....\WINNT\Cookies
Security information:
Be sure you are using an encrypted transfer mode (e.g. Secure Socket Layer - SSL) for any of your credit card transactions.
note: If you are an Internet Explorer 5.0 surfer, be aware that if you have the form autocomplete turn on, it will remember and store your credit card information on your PC in clear text!
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Web server logs: Every time you request a resource from a server, that access is logged. The log file information is part of the 'handshaking' exchange that goes on between your browser and the server before data is transferred. To see the kind of information that is available, go to this 'madlib' and submit it.
Newsgroups: Your postings may be easily found if you post on a popular.
See what others are writing about. Go to
HotBot or DejuNews and search
on 'company.com'.
Look-up services: Any number of specialized search services make public information about you
easily available. You might consider these services 'helpful' at times or 'an invasion of privacy'.
Reverse telephone lookup is a case in point.
To get the full privacy impact, be sure to click on the highlighted street link.
References and reading:
Plug-Ins
This article from PC World summarizes plug-ins and has pointers to some of the more popular ones.
Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) viewer is one of the most common plug-ins. Clicking on a link automatically loads the document once you have installed the plug-in. (Example of a common federal government PDF document).
References:
- Internet Explorer Technically Internet Explorer does not need plug-ins, but it can use them if they are installed. Instead, Internet Explorer uses ActiveX components.
