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I want to know how delete my browsing history SECURELY so someone with technical knowledge can't open my computer and figure out my history so everything is GONE completely. Any way of doing this?

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  • 1st: question: are you the administrator of your system and all other connected hardware? If not... forget about it: it will -always- be possible for the admin to log this.
    – Rinzwind
    Dec 7, 2014 at 12:14
  • Due to wear-leveling on modern SSDs it's basically impossible to delete anything securely so it can't be recovered. The only way to guarantee no traces remain is to make sure the information never hits the disks. Using Incognito mode helps as it's not supposed to save your history in the first place.
    – Minos
    Mar 23, 2016 at 13:19

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You've asked to completely wipe your browsing history from your hard drive, so the answer to that can be found below starting from point 1.

You should know however that if you're talking about end-to-end browsing it's impossible to delete your browsing history: If you googled it, Google knows forever; your ISP knows everything you do, your router keeps a log, ... (no deed to go on, right?)

To securely wipe stuff from your hard drive:

  1. Install sudo apt-get install secure-delete

    This will give you 4 additional commands:

    • sfill: secure free disk and inode space wiper: wipe all free space on your HDD
    • srm: secure remove: to securely remove 1 or more files
    • sdmem: secure memory wiper: to securely delete data from RAM
    • sswap: secure swap wiper: securely wipe data from you swap space
  2. Just delete the browsing history as you would normally do
  3. Run sfill szDriveOrDirectory where szDriveOrDirectory is the mount point or the directory you want to wipe. (I don't use Chrome nor know your system config so cannot tell you the exact directory nor drive)

For more info: man sfill

However HDD and SSD technology has changed a lot over the years: both HDD and SSD's are currently running at their maximum physical operating modes and contain "spare" sectors that get swapped out on-the-fly by their SMART technology as they're degrading and these sectors are unavailable to the OS, hence to the tools above.

Therefore, the only way to 100% securely wiping any hard drive is to melt it down!

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