Safety resources - protect yourself

For your own safety do not use any computer to which your abuser has access; consider using a computer at work, in a library, or a friend’s or family member’s computer.

When you have to use your own computer, consider the following tips to help protect yourself.

Most current browsers have a private browsing mode; which allows you to view information without leaving as much of a trace. If your browser does not have a private browsing feature, at minimum, you should clear your browser history.

However, be advised that these steps will not remove all traces of your computer activities.

How to Clear Your Browser History

This simple process won’t affect your computer other than to erase the information showing you have visited certain pages.

All browsers provide a way to clear the history, recent searches, cache, cookies, databases, stored passwords and form values.

This can be done on current browsers with the browser's “Tools” menu. Older operating systems and browsers allow history to be cleared by selecting “options” or “preferences”.

If your abuser clicks on “History” and all of your history has been manually cleared it could raise suspicion. When this happens, and you are the only other person using that computer, a good explanation is that you heard or read that deleting these temporary history files makes your computer faster.