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

Nosotros covered the state of online privacy in a recent mini-serial, outlining particulars virtually covering your tracks on services like Facebook, search engines, and even torrents. Calculation to those articles, we thought it'd be handy to provide a curt tip explaining how you tin automatically starting time today's near 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 heed that private browsing offers most no protection across the local level -- for example, the websites you lot have visited volition still be able to view your IP address on the server end and log your action.

Internet Explorer 8

  • Method 1: Correct click your IE shortcut icon > Properties > add -individual after the text in the Target box and click OK.
  • Method 2: This isn't actually a second method per se, just you can start IE8 with private mode via the Windows 7 jumplist.

Firefox iii.6

  • Method 1: Open up Firefox, click Tools > Options > click the History drop-down box and select Use custom settings for history > toggle Automatically start Firefox in a private browsing session and click OK.
  • Method 2: Open Firefox, enter about:config in the address bar > filter browser.privatebrowsing.autostart > double click on the entry to make information technology truthful and close the tab.
  • Method three: Correct click your Firefox shortcut icon > Properties > add together -private subsequently the text in the Target box and click OK.

Chrome 5

  • Method ane: Correct click your Chrome shortcut icon > Properties > add -incognito after the text in the Target box and click OK.
  • Method two: This isn't really a second method per se, but y'all can starting time Chrome with incognito mode via the Windows 7 jumplist.

Safari 5

  • There doesn't seem to exist any built-in way of accomplishing this on Safari, but we've found various script solutions for OS X users. If you know of a like workaround for Windows, let'southward hear it in the comments.

Opera x.5

  • Correct click your Opera shortcut icon > Properties > add -newprivatetab after the text in the Target box and click OK.

Granted, you lot probably don't desire to run your chief browser in private mode permanently, only it could be useful to accept a secondary browser already configured to run without a trace for those times when yous need to get dark. Chances are y'all accept at to the lowest degree two browsers installed on your system anyhow.