In the digital age in which we live, online privacy is a vitally important issue. We often wonder if our personal data is being collected and used without our knowledge. The good news is that there are steps we can take to further protect our privacy, such as deleting the browsing history on our iPhone and using private browsing. Let’s see how to do this and why it is important.
How to delete the browsing history on your iPhone
Browsing history is a record of the websites we have visited while browsing with Safari on our device. Although this history is stored only on the device and is not shared with third parties, deleting it is a way to protect our privacy. Why? Because in addition to deleting the browsing history, cookies are also deleted, which has a direct impact on our privacy.
Those small files that websites use to track our activities and store information about our preferences disappear. And all this is thanks to delete the history, something that we will do by following these steps:
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
- We entered Safari.
- Click on Clear history and website data.
- Confirm by tapping on Clear history and data.
Alternatively, we can carry out the deletion from the Safari app. In this case the steps to follow are as follows:
- We open the Safari application on our iPhone or iPad.
- Touch the button with a book icon, located at the bottom of the screen.
- Tap the clock icon to access the browsing history.
- Tap Delete at the bottom right of the screen.
- Choose between deleting the history of Last Hour, Today, Today and Yesterday and All
Regardless of how we delete the history, in addition to this, we will have deleted the cookies that the websites have stored. Something that, although it only contributes in part, improves our privacy.
How to use private browsing on the iPhone
Another way to protect your online privacy without having to periodically clear your history is to use Safari’s private browsing feature. Private browsing means that Safari does not save your browsing history in the first place and deletes cookies and website data when you close the tab you are in.
In addition, this function shares the navigation for each tab, which means that the data of a tab is not shared with the others. Enabling private browsing on our iPhone is very simple, we can even ask Siri. Manually we will do it like this:
- Open the Safari app on your iPhone or iPad.
- Touch the button with the icon of two overlapping squares.
- Touch the selector to the right or left of the “+” button.
- Choose Private Navigation.
- Tap the “+” sign to open a new tab within the private browsing mode.
Measures such as deleting history – and cookies – or preventing websites from saving them in the first place with private browsing have a lot of value. Protecting our privacy has clear advantages. The profiles that advertisers create about us can, in addition to compromising personal information, leak and end up in the wrong hands. Overpaying for a plane or a hotel is just one example of the situation.
Privacy is clearly an increasingly important issue in today’s digital world. Just as we can use the hide photo feature to keep some photos private and protected, deleting browsing history and cookies on our iPhone is an effective way to protect our online privacy, as it allows us to have greater control over our personal information and how it is used while browsing.
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