Active Privacy Guardian Washer 1.58

CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: CNET Staff

This privacy utility earns our praise for both its comprehensive feature set and its clever design. Active Privacy Guardian Washer arranges all supported browsers, system areas, and applications in a tree-like structure in the main window's left pane. The right pane lets you preview all items within each category, such as cookies or temporary Internet files. We appreciated the program's support for a whopping eight Web browsers, including such lesser-known ones as Avant and NetCaptor. As with other privacy applications, it also can wipe your history from common system areas such as the Clipboard and the Run menu. Active Privacy Guardian Washer erases tracks from a huge number of third-party applications, including IM clients, media players, the Microsoft Office suite, and multiple file-sharing applications. Although you can choose to clean data according to several secure govermental algorithms, you won't find a dedicated file shredder. Despite that omission and the somewhat short two-week trial period, we can enthusiastically recommend this program to those seeking to keep their PC activities to themselves.

Publisher's description

From Paul Lowrance :

Safely wash your PC activities providing a faster, smoother, and error-free PC with more disk space. Includes 100's of washes for 8 browsers, 21 Windows system areas, unused disk space, MS Office, music and video players, cookies, chat and IM programs. Includes a utility to peek inside your files and registries, create custom washes with flexible tools, schedule washes, choose from 6 wipe algorithms including the Peter Gutmann 35 pass used by the U.S. government. Version 1.58 includes unspecified updates.

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