TG Security and Your Computer

by Christy Kay

Security. It's a topic in that's never far from our minds when ever we are interacting with others. How safe do I feel revealing this part myself to this other person. For many of us, our inner-most secret is that we have a gender-difference from many of our friends and neighbors, and that our life could become very miserable if the wrong person found out about it.

So when we are talking to each other, we are very careful when asking personal questions to qualify that if the question is seen to be too personal, not feel free to tell us. But many of us are leaving evidence in basically plain sight to anyone who cares to look on our computers when we are sending e-mail or browsing the Web.

I searched my own computer a few minutes ago, just to see what dregs I could find. I am the only user, so I am fairly careless about documents, and all my drives are contaminated with incriminating evidence.. After all, I've got all the issues of the (the St.Louis Gender Foundation's Newsletter) Gazette on mine since July-August 1995, along with photos, and articles. That's really not what I was looking for, I was looking for things I did not know was there.

First stop, my web browser. I use Netscape, and it leaves numerous crumbs as you browse. It saves copies of the pages you look at so that if you go back, it loads the saved file and does not repeatedly ask for that page across the Net. I found 573 files that were saved for future viewing, and One file that was a directory of the others. Viewing the index file showed the address of each and every file. Words like transgender, crossdress, and transsexual, showed up many times, along with Revlon, miniskirt and Leggs were there too. If I were had a spouse or child who used my computer, that would be very revealing.

I also use Internet Explorer and America On Lines Web Browser to check how our less fortunate sisters view our web site, and, wouldn't you know it, they also have a compatible caching scheme.

E-mail also leaves trails. Every major e-mail program I've looked as saves your e-mail in a file also. There could be very interesting tidbits there for an interloper.

I also have a utility that saves trashed files, in case you change your mind and need to resurrect that file you knew you'd never need again yesterday, but has become crucial to you self-preservation today. Not only are the trashed files there, but every file I've printed in the last month or so has a copy the computer saved to disk before printing due to my print Spooling software. Not only are copies of the Gazette retained there, but articles I've downloaded off the Internet also. Even if you don't have such a utility, when most computers delete a file, they do not erase it's contents, they just mark the allocated space as being available for writing a new file over. I found some pretty ancient file fragments lurking in the background.

So what does one do? Recognize the dangers that do exist. There are utilities that will erase deleted files. I have one called Flame File. Any file you run it on gets Flame File written over it. If you run it on a disk, it writes all the empty space.

If you take the computer in for service, backup your Web-Browsers and related files, then delete the originals. You can restore them when you get the computer back.

If you can, install web-browsers and e-mail programs on a disk you can remove if the computer goes in for service, or is used by others.

Don't pass along Hard-drives to children, relatives, or strangers with out sanitizing it first. There are utilities that will do this. Remember, allowing access to your computer can be akin to handing someone the keys to your personal diary.

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