Imagine someone else sitting down to your computer and opening up your cache file. They would be able to see images, text, video and more from all the websites that you have visited. They would basically be able to see what you had seen. Would you want someone else to access to that information?

Privacy software should take care of all your PC privacy concerns. A good piece of privacy software will delete your cookies, erase your Internet history files, and clear out all your cache. Good privacy software goes to the deepest levels of your hard drive and deletes all these files permanently.

Index.dat is a file used by Microsoft Internet Explorer to store web addresses, search queries, and recently opened files. One of the biggest dangers of the index.dat file is that it remains on your computer even once you’ve disabled the AutoComplete feature. Even worse is that the file is very difficult, if not impossible, to erase from your computer.

Even if you try to delete cookies, delete cache and erase Internet files through Windows Explorer, all you are really doing is deleting the reference to the file and not the actual file itself. Windows protects these files deep on your hard drive. The only way to really delete these hidden files by hand is to go into DOS and work through a command prompt. Would you be comfortable doing that?

Have you ever bought something from a website that required a login, like Amazon.com? When you come back to that website days later, you are greeted with a phrase like “Welcome back Jane!” in the top of the web page. How did the website magically remember your name? Simple - the website used a type of file called a Cookie.

How can you delete Internet History, Cookies, Cache and other telling web tracks? You could go through your hard drive and try to clear your cache, delete your cookies, and delete your Internet history by hand, but unless you are extremely experienced in navigating the file structures of your computer, chances are you will erase something important by accident. And even if you successfully deleted these files by hand, Internet Explorer keeps another file called “index.dat” hidden on your computer in several locations.

You may think that your browser history is stored somewhere on your C: drive and that getting rid of it is simply a matter of highlighting a file and pressing delete. This is not the case. Your PC actually stores your browser history deep on your hard drive. And deleting stuff at that level is complicated.

The files that you find in Windows Explorer are really just references to the real files stored deep inside your hard drive. When you think you are deleting these files off your computer, you are really just deleting the references to them.

Whether you know it or not, your computer is compiling a very comprehensive record of you and your online activities. All the websites you’ve visited, all the images you’ve looked at and all the files you’ve downloaded are all stored in multiple locations deep within the depths of your PC. And it doesn’t take a computer genius to find them. A simple Google search can teach anyone how to find these telling files. Sounds scary doesn’t it?

Your Internet History is a list that details every website you have ever visited and it’s stored deep within the depths of your hard drive. Originally this list was created to make web surfing more convenient.