1y ago

Should I always clear the web browser cache?

I am using Mozilla Firefox as my web browser. I have configured it to clear cookies, active logins, form & search history, and offline website data when I close Firefox. Should I also configure it to clear the cache? What are the privacy implications if I don't clear the cache?

EDIT: additional information:

My goal is to reduce fingerprinting and tracking by websites.
I use Mozilla Firefox on my personal laptop that almost never leaves my residence. The laptop has full disk encryption. I am the only user of the laptop.
I don’t erase my web browser history. I want to keep browser history for my future reference.

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18 comments

If you don't clear the cache, somebody could forensically examine your hard drive, and infer what websites you've been to.
The tricky thing is, even if you clear the cache on exit, the files still exist on the hard drive or SSD. And still can be recovered forensically. It's better to not write them at all to disk if you're worried about privacy
If you want to browser that doesn't store anything on disc, look at the tor foundation browser, or the mullvad browser. Both code bases do everything they can to prevent things from being written to disk even temporarily.
- This is why I drill my drives everytime I shut down my computer /s
  
  Ah, the famous hard reset
  
  Expensive practice:) I've worked for corporations that require all data storage to be destroyed when the computer is retired or resold. So the drives get stripped out, sent to a company that certifies that the drives are completely destroyed. Because of this exact reason.
  I think I've even seen the iron mountain data destruction truck parked outside. They just destroy the hard drives on site even. It's great
  
  Yeah the school district I worked for did this too
  
  Are you even taking privacy seriously if you don't use thermite every time you close a browser tab to erase all evidence?
- That's why you use a TMP drive for cache, a ram disk or on Linux store cache in tmpfs.
- It you can also use librewolf

18 comments