The Software Corner November, 2002 Download original article in PDF format, 47.6 KB
Acronis Privacy Expert 2003
Introduction:Privacy for internet users is quite important. Websites and companies often collect information about you, like what browser you use, what operating system, etc. but then there is some that can see your viewing habits also. When surfing the internet, you collect useless files, which get stored in your temporary internet files folder. These files could be images, or even html files that would help you sometimes in loading a site you frequent a lot to load faster. But if you are those people who do transactions over the internet, your privacy is the utmost important to you because you do not want to take any chances that some intruder or hacker steals this information. Acronis Privacy Expert 2003 can also hide your tracks when usuing your computer locally, meaning it can clean up what files you were recently looking at, what files were downloaded, and more.
Functionality:Acronis Privacy Expert 2003 is a program that does what its name says, it protects your privacy. This program clears all traces of recently used files, files downloaded, cookie cleanup and more. Privacy Expert 2003 is broken up into 2 categories, Internet Cleanup and System Cleanup. In internet cleanup, you have the option of deleting all cookies that were sent to you from websites, clean your history folders to erase all the websites you've visited, clean your downloaded components and internet cache. The downloaded components consists of programs that have been automatically been downloaded and installed on your pc. For example, if you've gone to an online antivirus scanning site, certain files that are used to scan your pc online will be downloaded to your computer to enable the scanning to take place. Another space waster is internet cache, in which images and other files are downloaded to your comptuer when viewing websites. On the computer cleanup side, there are plenty of things you can choose from. You can clean your paging/swap file, recycling bin, free harddrive space and more. This program incorporates a lot of security features. Privacy Expoert 2003 incorportates Data Descruction Algorithm (DDA), which allows you to choose algorithms for deleting data from your computer. There are 8 algorithms to choose from, in which it replaces the now empty space with random numbers so that no one could recover the files. PE2003 also claims that it is so secure that your data cannot be recovered with the use of electron microscopy techniques! Acronis Privacy Expert 2003 also comes with a scheduler so you can schedule how frequently you want to clean up your tracks and remove unnecessary files. Yuu can also clean up all the junk files by using the Entire PC Cleanup button.
Conclusion:Acronis Privacy Expert is a very simple and easy to use program to protect yourself from unwanted people seeing your personal information and other things that you might not want other people to get access to like your credit card numbers. With the addition of DDA, now you even have more options of protecting your computer by making sure whatever is on there cannot be restored, this is especially good when you are selling your old computer, you want to make sure that none of your personal information could be restored. This is very important because who knows whether or not the person you are selling your old computer to knows how to restore this information. Acronis also gives a well explained and thorough manual with their programs, so you can follow step by step on how to use the module. It also goes into detail what the program comes with and also the different algorithms that are incorcoporated into the program.
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Acronis Inc. Backup software.