These days it's really easy to become a victim of identity theft or credit card fraud. The Internet is full of hazards and malware developers are constantly working on finding new ways to steal your private information. That's why you should protect yourself in any way possible. The first thing you need to do is install a good anti-virus and keep it up-to-date. But that's not enough. You can also protect yourself by cleaning up your hard drive. Here is how.
When you browse the Internet, different files are saved on your computer. Even if you don't actually download anything, your browser saves files in its cache to help load pages faster in the future. In addition to that, a lot of websites use cookies to get familiar with your browsing habits, save your email address for auto-login settings and basically remember you. These files may seem harmless, but they are a very real privacy threat. Not all websites are secure, which means that sometimes temporary Internet files in your browser cache may contain your details and even your passwords. And that's something you wouldn't want falling into the wrong hands.
The best way to prevent this from happening is to set up FileCleaner to run automatic browser cache and cookies cleanup. This will delete all these files as soon as you close your browser.
Deleting temporary files and cookies is important, but there is something else that you need to do to protect your privacy - shred files that contain your private information instead of deleting them. When you delete a file, it's simply moved to the Recycle Bin. But even when you empty the recycle bin, your deleted files are not really gone. Windows deletes files in a special way that makes it possible to recover them later on. When you hit the Delete key on your keyboard, Windows simply removes the file name from its index, but it doesn't touch the actual file. The file stays on your hard drive until it's overwritten with new data. You have no control over when the actual information will be deleted, which means that there is always a really good chance that your files can be recovered. It's OK when you want to recover files that you deleted by accident, but it's a real threat to your privacy if someone else recovers files that contain your bank details, credit card numbers or passwords.
The best way to securely delete files is to use a file shredder - a special program that overwrites the file straight away using complicated patterns to make it truly unrecoverable. FileCleaner has a built-in file shredder that will help you stay safe.
As you can see, using FileCleaner to clean up your disk can not only make your computer faster, but also protect you from online threats.
