Maintaining confidentiality

As if spam, spyware, viruses and other threats to your security weren’t enough, the web is also a privacy minefield.

If you knew what sites you could trust then navigating the web would be easy. But then you would rarely visit a new site. Below is some guidance as to how you can set your browser to help you deal with trusted sites.

Most browsers work on a trust/freedom scale with a series of levels of trust or ‘zones’. The more you trust a website, the more freedom it has to upload, download, run software and check out information about you.

In Internet Explorer, there are three basic trust zones with different levels of security:

The Internet zone has a medium security setting, which prompts you to accept or reject most things generally considered unsafe and allows some programs to download and run. (This is the default zone – each site you visit starts in this zone, unless you assign it otherwise.)

Trusted sites are allowed to use all cookies (small pieces of text stored on your computer that track which sites you have visited and when) and downloaded files are considered safe to run. Trusted sites should include sites that you use regularly and sites that you need for legitimate software download purposes – for example online virus scanning, operating system software and auto updating software sites. Any website you add to the Trusted site zone needs to be secure (that is, any communication you have with it should be encrypted and safe from prying eyes).

Restricted sites have cookies blocked, and warnings pop-up before any files are run. These sites should include those that use ad-tracking, and any sites that might contain dangerous software. To find out which sites meet these criteria, you can set prompts to warn you of most software that’s invisibly downloaded from the web so you can tell it’s there.

Mozilla can be set up to use a similar system, via its Cookie Manager.

If you just want to leave everything in the Internet zone, but prevent sites from sending you cookies that are unacceptable, you can use the privacy slider bar in the Internet Explorer Tools/Internet Options menu (or cookie manager in Mozilla’s Edit/Preferences menu) to adjust how your browser handles cookies.