Privacy Guardian: A good app for folks wanting to cover their tracks
Written: May 12 '06 (Updated May 12 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Does what it says, and does it well
Cons: There are a few minor shortcomings detailed in the review
The Bottom Line: With a few tweaks this would be a five star app; as is it is defintely useful for folks desiring privacy on their PC's.
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| ivplay's Full Review: PC Tools Privacy Guardian 4 for Windows |
Surfing the internet; we all do it. During our surfing time we are filling our computers with personal information ranging from cookies to index.dat files to recent documents file history. Additionally, there is a cache buildup taking up space on the hard drives, and anyone who comes along behind us can see exactly where we have surfed. Not good! With the need for privacy online more important than ever, I have tried a few privacy protection suites and apps out in the past. When a review copy of Privacy Guardian from PC Tools was made available, I jumped at the chance to run it through its paces.
PC Tools (the creator of the popular title Spyware Doctor) now offers Privacy Guardian (at times referred to as PG hereafter), a software application designed to assist you with covering your tracks on a PC. PG provides an easy to use interface and loads of functionality to erase your personal and private information that is left behind after a session on a PC. Once the user has eliminated all of the private data with Privacy Guardian, the program can optionally completely eradicate the data from the drive using the Bleach Free Space utility. This functionality can also be used for specific files on your PC via clicking on the icon for the Shredder. PC Tools was created to delete and eradicate personal information from a Windows install, and it performs these functions very well.
System Requirements
Before purchasing any software package, ensure that your current computer configuration can handle it. PC Tools recommends at least the following for Privacy Guardian:
● Intel 486 processor or higher
● 16 MB of RAM available (128MB or higher is preferred)
● 7 MB of free hard disk space
● Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater
● Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, or XP
The program will run with these specifications, but I have to say that it would run slow. More than likely you would want the upper end or even higher for the RAM, as with only 16MB of RAM available the app is going to drag on interminably. Knowing that this app will work with Windows installs all the way back to Win95 is comforting, but I will stick with my XP installs for now….
Purchase/Install
In my case the registration information was sent as a review copy, so no purchase was necessary. However, for those of you looking to buy you can do one of three things:
1. Click on the Compare Prices tab at the top of this page.
2. Navigate to www.pctools.com and purchase through their online store.
3. Find the app in your local computer store.
I personally have not noticed this boxed app at my local store, and the Compare Prices tab usually found at the top of the page appears to be broken at the time of this writing. Hopefully this will be fixed soon, as this is after all a comparison shopping site. Going to PC Tools website allows the user to download an unlimited free trial of the program. While this is unlimited in time, it is limited in functionality as explained below. Registration of the app costs $29.95 at this time and includes one year of free updates, upgrades and customer support. The registration covers one install on one PC with multiple licenses available at discounted prices.
Installation of Privacy Guardian is a snap. Simply download the executable file to your PC and run it to open the installation window. During the install you can choose between adding desktop icons or quick launch icons, and then you are on your way to running either the full app or the free trial.
System Resources Usage
One thing I like to take note of when installing a new application on my PC is the system resources used. By today's standards Privacy Guardian has fairly minimal usage. A fresh install of PG will take up a little over 4.5 MB of space on your C drive. When the application is running in the system tray it will consume roughly 16MB of RAM. While running a cleanup it will obviously take a little more RAM, although not much. When Bleaching free space the computer will think that the hard drive is completely filled up, but this is a function of how the application acts as discussed below. The effect of this is that the computer may become unresponsive while the Bleaching process is occurring, as PG uses a lot of processor when performing this function.
Use of the program
Upon opening the Privacy Guardian application, I was pleased with the minimal yet functional user interface. PG has stayed away from the lure of the 'suite mentality' in that the application is designed to do only a couple of broad tasks yet do them very well. Remember when Nero was a CD-burning application? That is a perfect example of an app that has become progressively more unstable and unusable as a company tries to throw in everything and the kitchen sink. With Privacy Guardian, this is not a concern as PC Tools has stayed true to the intent of the app which is to delete and eradicate personal, private information from a PC. There are three buttons to choose from on the interface, and they are Clean Your Computer, Shred Files, and Settings. Along the left side of the interface is an additional button for the Shredder, and an icon for this function can be added to the desktop. Each function will be described below.
Cleaning out the trash
The first part of deleting and eradicating private data from your computer is of course to delete it. No one disputes that you could take the time to navigate to each of the folders on the system and hand-delete the personal information that PG eliminates, but by the time you did so a few hours would have transpired. Why not just click a button and have Privacy Guardian do it in a few seconds? PG allows the user to choose to erase any or all of the following:
● Windows recent document contents, find/search results, Run history, temporary files directory, Recycle Bin and the contents of the clipboard.
● Recent Files list for Microsoft Office applications
● Internet Explorer cache, history, address bar history, cookies, index.dat files, Auto-Complete form data and Downloaded files.
● Cache, History, address bar, cookies and passwords in the Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox browsers.
● Cache, History, address bar, cookies and passwords for the Opera browser.
● Recent File and URL history in Windows Media Player
● Third party software history cleaning; over 80 apps included.
If you can live without cleaning your Windows Media Player files and the 80 or so third party applications, you don't need to purchase and register the product. Be aware that the trial software also is lacking the Bleach Free Space utility, so anything deleted by the program will still be available to the talented computer hacker. In this case the application will delete the information, but it is not eradicated.
I have run this application several times on both my home and work machine, and in each case I feel that the application does what it says. Running the app takes very little time (anywhere from 15 seconds to a minute or two), and immediately after the app is complete it will prompt the user to refresh or restart Windows. I recommend a total restart, as some of the information which is deleted will not actually disappear until this is completed. Upon restarting, a quick check of several applications shows that the information was truly deleted, thus increasing my confidence in the application. Now that the information is deleted, it is time to eradicate it.
If you want the same list of cleaning to occur each and every time PG is run, you can select which items to delete and click the Save button. This will keep the settings the same, so each time you don’t have to uncheck and check boxes to get the appropriate items cleaned.
Bleach Free Space
Did you know that when you send a file or folder to the recycle bin or delete it directly it is not actually deleted? Windows simply changes the first one or few letters in the file name to null values and eliminates the index in the File Allocation Table. What this means is that the data is still present on the hard drive, just not visible to the Windows application. Anyone with a half-baked data recovery application can pull this data back out of the recycle bin, so long as you haven’t subsequently saved data over the specific address on the hard drive.
Knowing this, it seems important for privacy-minded individuals to delete their information in a more secure way. Enter Privacy Guardian. PG has this functionality and expresses it in two different ways, through the Bleach Free Space and Shredder tools. If you would like to use this in conjunction with a cleaning of the system as described above, simply place a check in the appropriate box at the bottom of the interface for Clean Your Computer. The app will then run the deletion tools described above, changing the file names in Windows and thus causing Windows to think that the space is 'Free'. At then end of this time, the Bleach Free Space utility will come along and fill all of the free space on the drive with garbage data, after which it will delete the garbage data, as I understand it. This is performed using a Department of Defense algorithm known as DoD 5220.22-M. While this is occurring Windows will see the hard drive filling up with data and warn you that disk space is low, but you can ignore this or optional choose to shut off this warning in the Settings screen. By running the Bleach Free Space tool, the data is utterly destroyed and impossible to recreate.
If you wish to Bleach the contents of the free space without running the application, this can be accomplished by unchecking all other options in the Clean Your Computer interface and running the app. Also available is a Shredder tool by which the user can select individual files for deletion and eradication, and if you have this app I would recommend performing this task as opposed to sending items to the recycle bin for simple deletion.
Settings
The settings screen allows the user to customize the PG experience. From within this interface the user can choose several options, one of which is to Globally clean IE tracks. If your PC has multiple users accounts, unchecking this will only allow the application to delete the cookies, cache, etc. of the currently logged on user. Checking this will allow the app to clean all tracks for all users, even those not currently logged in. This is added peace of mind for those that want to eliminate all evidence of activity. One thing to keep in mind (and a shortcoming of PG in my mind) is that if you have designated any cookies to be saved as explained below, they will be eradicated if the user chooses to globally clean tracks.
The Settings screen also allows the user to set PG to run at prescribed times, either by schedule or event. For instance, the user can set PG to run on startup (an event) or at a set interval (schedule) anywhere from every 30 minutes to every month. This gives some flexibility to the user for automatic data dumping, although here again is a shortcoming of PG. You see, if PG is not running and minimized to the system tray the scheduling will not work! With several other programs I don’t need to be running the app taking up valuable RAM in order for the scheduled task to run, as they take advantage of Windows inherent scheduling ability. PG apparently does not, so you will need to sacrifice some RAM (albeit only 16MB) and show an additional system tray icon in order for this to work. It would be a positive addition to the app to change this.
From the Settings screen a report of what items were cleaned can be created and viewed at the termination of a cleaning, and I find this handy to see exactly what information has been deleted. The user can also view what cookies are present on the computer and choose 'friendly' cookies to save during the cleaning process, although as mentioned above checking 'Globally clean IE tracks' will render this task useless.
My experiences
As I said above, I have used this application at work and home with great success. The app is quick to run (unless Bleaching occurs) and my data is eliminated. I have found that between 2000 and 12000 items are deleted when this application runs depending on the use of the computer and the length of time between cleaning. The report function allows you to see exactly what information is deleted, and you can use this to verify that the information is actually eradicated if you like. The shredder function has replaced the Recycle Bin for my use, and the addition of the Shred option to the Windows right-click context menu makes this quite easy to perform. It would be nice if dragging and dropping of files to the Shredder icon would automatically run the tool on the selected file, but then this might result in unwittingly losing data. Overall I am very pleased with the application with a few minor drawbacks and highly recommend this application for those privacy-minded individuals.
An aside: I wish…
Considering I just reviewed the applicationPass2Go, it is worth noting that the functionality missing from it is exactly that found in Privacy Guardian. While Pass2Go keeps user passwords and personal information stored on a USB key as opposed to the host PC, it does not erase your activity tracks when you pull the key. If PC Tools modified Privacy Guardian to run from a USB key, the two combined would be perfect for folks who use public computers frequently. Pass2Go would keep your personal information at finger's length by storing them on the USB key securely while Privacy Guardian would delete and eradicate the user's tracks when the session was over. Thus all traces of your activity would be rendered useless, allowing you to move on secure in the knowledge that your information and activity was safely guarded. Maybe someday this will be available, eh?
Recommended:
Yes
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