Ohye: Hi. My name is Maile Ohye.
I'm a senior support engineer at Google.
In this video, I'd like to talk about Web browsers.
We use browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari
to surf the Web, view Web sites,
and run Web applications like Gmail.
But many of us aren't familiar with the tools in most browsers
that protect your privacy by letting you decide
what information is stored on your browser
and what the Web sites you visit can see about you.
I'll also talk about some of the unique features
we've built into our Web browser, Google Chrome,
that give you options
for protecting your privacy while surfing the Web.
Browsers can store information
such as your browsing history,
which is a list of the Web sites you visited previously.
This makes it possible for you
to find a page you've seen before
without having to remember the Web site's entire address,
called the URL.
There are cases when you might not
want your browser to store your history.
Let's say you share a computer with other people
and don't want them to know what sites you visited.
Just click "Delete" on the History page
or go to the preferences on your browser
to delete your browsing history.
Browsers also let you store cookies.
Cookies are set on your browser by Web sites
to store useful information and preferences--
for example, if you want to view
your search results on Google only in English.
This way, even if you leave Google or close your browser,
the next time you visit,
Google will see the cookie from your browser
and remember your preferences.
Cookies are also how certain Web sites
remember your username and password every time you visit,
and how online stores remember
what you put in your shopping cart.
It's important to remember
from the third video in our Search Privacy series
that cookies don't store any personal information about you
like your name or address.
They're just a string of numbers and letters
that Web sites use to match your browser
with the right information.
You can view the cookies
currently stored on your browser.
You can delete individual cookies
or remove all of them at once.
If you don't want to receive cookies,
you can change your browser settings
to refuse all cookies.
Browsers also let you delete all private data
like your browsing history, download history,
and cookies in one fell swoop.
You can delete private data over the period of time you choose--
like just from today, or from the last week--
or you can delete all private data from your browser.
In Google Chrome, our engineers
have come up with additional features
that let you control your browser experience
and protect your privacy and security even further.
We wanted you to have a special private mode for surfing the Web
so that the sites you view are not logged on your computer
and all cookies and records of downloads
are automatically cleared when you close your browser window.
We call this special mode "Incognito Mode."
To turn it on, click on "New incognito window"
in the Page menu.
Nothing will be saved on your browser
when you're in incognito mode.
So if you're searching for a gift for your husband,
he won't see any trace of it
if he uses the same browser on your shared home computer.
We've also built a special kind of browsing history
that not only stores the URLs you visited,
but also indexes the full text of the pages you've seen before.
This means your search suggestions
will include results from any pages you've already visited,
making it even easier
to navigate to a page you've seen before
when you can't remember its URL.
But how do we make sure that sensitive information
doesn't show up in your history?
Well, first, we don't index sites you access securely
such as online banking and email.
Second, any sites you have visited in incognito mode
obviously don't get indexed.
Remember, you can delete your browsing history at any time.
And if you don't want to use the search suggestions feature,
you can turn it off entirely.
Just go to the Options dialogue box in the Tools menu
and click on "Manage search settings."
We don't like phishing sites
that try to steal your login information
or malware sites that try to infect your computer.
You probably don't either.
In Google Chrome,
we've designed a feature that helps protect you
from typing in your login and password
on a site pretending to be legitimate--
for instance, a site pretending to be your bank.
It also warns you when you browse to a site
that's trying to install malware on your computer.
Google Chrome will keep an updated list
of the bad sites we know about.
If you visit one of them, the browser will send
a special, encrypted code to Google to get more information.
To protect your privacy, Google will never know
the exact URL of the site you're trying to access--
only enough to send you the right warning.
We've contributed this same feature to Firefox.
I hope this gives you a better idea
of how Web browsers and Google Chrome work
and how to protect your privacy when you use them.
To learn more, visit our privacy center at google.com/privacy.
Thanks for watching, and thanks for using Google.