Your computer (well, actually the programs on your computer) track and save many of your actions. For example Windows remembers which programs you have started, Internet Explorer remembers which websites you have visited, Google Toolbar remembers the words that you have searched for, and so on. These traces of your computer activity are commonly known as history.

Contrary to the popular belief that this is done in order to harm you as part of some sort of worldwide conspiracy, history is actually used for the purpose of making your computer experience more convenient. However, as in many other cases, the good things can be used for bad purposes. In this case the information about your computer habits can be used from someone to gather very private information about yourself and to harm you, your work, your business, or your family. The privacy threats include many more things than history. Nevertheless, history is one of the most obvious traces and is very easy to abuse.

What kinds of history are there?

There are generally two types of history: the first one is created by Windows, Internet Explorer or other parts of the operating system; and the second one is created by other applications (such as Media Player, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, etc.). The second type is covered in the next chapter of this article.

The most important type of history is the Internet history that is created by Internet Explorer (from now on we will call it IE), which records every page that you have visited on the Internet. In order to see this history start Internet Explorer and select View -> Explorer Bar -> History. This will open a narrow window in the left side of the main IE window, which shows the pages that you have opened in the past.

The second type of history is Windows search history. It can be seen if you open the Search results window. To do that you need to click Start menu -> Search.

The next types of history are the Start menu Run history and Start menu most frequently used programs.

There are other types of history but all of them are associated with specific applications.

Applications history:

The first type of application history is called Common file dialog history. Almost every application has some sort of open/save features and most of the applications use the Windows-provided dialogs for these operations. This ensures that open/save dialogs of most programs are very similar to each other. However here comes the bad news - Windows records the names of the files that you open or save. Even if these names do not show in the file open/save dialog of particular application, they are still recorded and can be viewed from someone who knows where to look for them.

Now, let's take a look at the Media Player history items. First, there is a list of most recently opened files in the File menu of Media Player. Second, each played file is remembered in the default playlist.

Google Toolbar, Google Deskbar, Yahoo toolbar and ICQ toobar all have a special type of search history that records the words that you have searched for.

How to delete history?

Deleting of all history traces is very hard task that can not be done manually because most of them are stored in system areas that are not directly accessible from the user. Also the history traces are so many and they are scattered at so many places that their manual deletion would be very long and tedious work with high probability of mistakes that could lead to privacy holes or even render your computer unusable.

Mil Shield is a powerful privacy protection program that was designed specifically to delete all types history that are described in this article; to clean and shred the index.dat files; and to clean all other privacy-related traces as cookies, Temporary Internet Files, AutoComplete forms and passwords, UserData records, and many others.