Internet Privacy on MyGSA.ca: Minimizing your E-Footprint

At MyGSA.ca we are committed to maintaining your privacy and confidentiality, and will protect these to the best of our ability. This means keeping your registration information completely confidential and thus invisible to other users. While we allow for communication between individual users and Canadian GSAs, we do so through an anonymous email feature which allows for contact without revealing the address information of the GSA contact.

As is the case with all internet communication, there is serious potential for your personal information to be abused if you distribute it to others on the MyGSA site.

MyGSA.ca makes sure to keep your account information private and invisible to other users and we encourage you to do the same with all personal info. As part of this, we suggest choosing a user name that is completely different from your actual given name. Maintaining your privacy also includes not revealing your email addresses, phone numbers, home address, banking information, etc. on any public area of MyGSA.ca. There should be no need to post private information on the forums or anywhere else on the site and we strongly discourage asking others to do so. If you are looking to reach members of another GSA, you are encouraged to use the anonymous email feature included in the GSA directory.

Whether you join as a student, a teacher, or a concerned community member, your safety is important to us and we encourage you to always act online with your safety in mind. 

Limiting Your Internet Footprint and Erasing Your Internet History

This information is based on a document created by Assaulted Women's Helpline and adapted by the LGBT Youth Line. Many thanks to both of these organisations for their kindness in allowing us adapt it further and post it here.

Concerned about someone finding out where you've been on the net?

Here's how to reduce the chances that your net travels will be traced. Browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox are designed to leave traces behind indicating where you've been and what you've been looking at on the Internet.

It's difficult to absolutely guarantee that your travels on the Internet can't be traced at all, but here are some simple things you can do to reduce the chances that someone can look through your computer and find out what you've been reading.

In general, you want to erase two things:

1. Your cache (this is where the computer stores copies of files you’ve recently looked at with your browser).

2. Your history list (this is a single file containing the addresses of the places you’ve recently visited).

Keep in mind that if you share your computer with your family, their cache and history will be erased as well.

If you use Internet Explorer...

• Open the TOOLS menu, select INTERNET OPTIONS.

• Select the GENERAL tab at the top.

• In the section called "Temporary Internet Files," click on "Delete Files."

• Your cache will now be cleared.

• On the same screen, in the section called "History," click on "Clear History."

• Your history list will now be cleared.

• Note that clearing the cache and history in Internet Explorer automatically clears your address bar.

If you use Firefox...

• Open the TOOLS menu, select OPTIONS.

• Select the PRIVACY tab located on the left side of the menu bar.

• Select the "History" tab and click on "Clear."

• Your history will now be cleared.

• Select the "Cache" tab and click on "Clear."

• Your cache will now be cleared.

• Note that clearing the cache and history in Firefox automatically clears your address bar as well.

There is also another option called "Clear all information stored while browsing."

This will remove ALL of your browsing history, cache, recently downloaded files, all saved information and searches, all cookies, and saved passwords.

• Select this tab and click OK.

• You will get a pop up to confirm that you are about to erase all information.

• Click OK.
  

One additional & important tip...

When you clear the cache and the history list, you erase not only the information on where you've been, but also any other information that had been stored there previously.

So if someone checks and sees that the cache and the history list have been completely emptied, they'll not only know that you know how to do this, but they might guess that you're trying to hide something.

One possible way to avoid suspicion is to clear the cache and history once you're done looking at information you don't want your family or anyone else to know about. After they're cleared, spend some time visiting other sites that you don't think will draw any suspicion (email, news, youtube, etc.). This way, the cache and history list start to get filled up and people might be less likely to notice that old information is missing.

Other Browsers...

Other browsers will be slightly different in the detail of what's required to do these two things. But in any case, what you'll need to do is clear your cache (or "temporary files") and erase your history list. Again, this doesn't guarantee that your browsing can't be traced. Someone with greater computer sophistication will still be able to reconstruct your net travels. But it's a good thing to do to make it more difficult for someone to know where you've been.