Index.dat the XP-ress Ticket to Jail

In my review of Window Washer, my prime complaint was that it promised to bleach or shred all my sensitive data and wipe away my residual activity records including temp files, cookies, history and cache files. Promises from their website include:

“Window Washer cleans all aspects of your browser activity, including Internet history, address bar, cache, cookies, and more. Mozilla and Firefox users now enjoy the same online privacy protection that users of Internet Explorer, AOL and Netscape already enjoy.”

Yet when I ran an index.dat Analyzer search for all index.dat files, I found several that were not erased and left a pretty complete record of all my activity.

Now remember, the index.dat file is the ones used at trial to convict a person of having very bad taste. It keeps track of search terms, and sites visited, and also thumbnails of all images. This is a permanent record that takes almost a herculean effort to remove, and because it is so misunderstood, I’m not sure what the next generation of record keeping files looks like and whether that can be found or erased. Minimally, anything that index.dat Analyzer can find for free, the legal programs can do as well or better and the secret stuff used by the FBI, CIA and NSA is probably even better.

So needless to say, when I purchase a program that promises to protect me and it fails to do even the most basic job at the task, I get a little miffed. Quite simply, Window Washer failed to remove any of my images, surfing history or cookies from the index.dat files so the record of my surfing was near perfect for anybody that wants to find it. In essence, a near perfect waste of money.

Next we do an analysis of Tenebril GhostSurf