Vulnerable Places on Your PC (or Where Your PC Privacy Can Be Breached)

Why care about PC privacy? The invasion of your PC privacy can lead to results as dire as identity theft or as benign as spam, but either way – the reason to care so much is because there are so many inroads a thief, voyeur, or spy can have into your internet footprint (read: your personal life online).

The following is a partial accounting of the myriad “places” in your computer that make you vulnerable to PC privacy invasion. For your convenience, and easy reference, we’ve divided them into items relating to your Online and Offline computer use.

Online (Browsers, Downloads, and Emails)

• Address Bar/Location Bar History – records the URLs for all the sites you’ve visited;

• Auto-Complete – records the keywords and keyword-phrases you enter into search engines and the information you enter into online forms;

• Caches (Temporary Internet Files) & Histories – records the content contained on each webpage that you’ve visited;

• Cookies – records your movement through a site as well as actions you’ve taken (ie. loaded up a shopping cart), and user preferences and settings you’ve selected on those pages;

• Downloaded files – records data regarding each and every file that you download, and often includes scads of malware (ie spyware and adware);

• Favorites or Bookmarks – records what sites you frequent; 

• Plug-Ins – often contain a combination of programs for collecting and recording an array of personal information about each user/downloader and their internet surfing patterns, email correspondences, contact lists, and media viewed; common plugins include:

• Browsers

• Chat rooms

• Email programs

• Games

• Graphic editors

• Instant messengers

• Media viewers

• P2P (peer-to-peer) programs

• URL Error Logs – records of websites you tried to visit but that, for one reason or another, failed to load.

Offline (Operating Systems and Applications)

• Clipboard Data – records operations that you recently performed, whether in Windows or another application;

• Index.dat files – record copies of whatever content is contained in the folders you use, regardless of whether or not you’ve manually emptied and deleted them, as well as any info collected by your Cookies or in your Histories and Caches, again regardless of whether or not you’ve manually cleared them;

• Open/Save (or Common Dialog) Box Histories – records a list in your Windows registry of each and every file that you’ve opened and each and every one that you’ve saved;

• Recent Documents – records the documents that you’ve opened most recently;

• Recycle Bin – retains every file that you’ve manually deleted from your computer until such time as it’s permanently destroyed;

• Registry Backups – records backups of all of the entries in your Windows registry;

• Registry Fragmented Files – holds on to fragments of data to be later reassembled;

• Registry Streams – records a history of your Internet Explorer settings in your registry;

• Run files – records each and every file you’ve run using the Run command;

• Scan Disk Temporary Files – records junk data in the root directories of your hard drives, taking up a lot of valuable space and slowing your performance down;

• Start Menu Click History – records whatever items you selected in your Start Menu and any information (like dates and times) related to that;

• Start Menu Order History – records any revisions you make to the order of the items in your Start Menu; 

• Swap Files – records anything that you’ve accessed from your hard drive;

• Temp Files (Temporary Files) – stores the files that you use in the process of installing or operating another program;

• Windows Search History –records all the searches you conduct through your hard drive (ie when you try to Find an application, file, or folder);

• Applications:

• Microsoft Office - including MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, etc., with particular attention on their Most Recently Used [MRU] or Recent Docs folders, which don’t get cleared automatically along with your regular MS Windows Recent Docs folder;

• RealPlayer and Windows Media Player – clearing your download, upload and playlist data (which includes the source where you got each file from) recorded by these and the other major digital audio and video players;

• Adobe Acrobat

• Quicktime

• Winzip

These aren’t the only vulnerable places on your PC, but they should give you a good idea of how exposed your PC is – and therefore you are – to any interested PC privacy invader. The best way to protect yourself againt PC privacy invasion is to install and regularly run a solid PC privacy program, like those reviewed on this site.