Opera Help and Support

Are you sharing your computer with colleagues, family, or co-habitants? Do you surf with Opera on publically accessible computers? This page holds some tips for maintaining privacy within the same computer and user account.

Shared Computer

First of all, when installing Opera on a multi-user Windows computer, make sure to opt for separate user directories during install. This will ensure that your settings, e-mail, Wand passwords, history, and so forth, are stored in your own user directory only. Remember that this may be of little use if other users have administrator privileges on the same machine, unless you protect your files by other means.

Shared Account

If the same user account is being used by several people, for example on a library, there are other precautions to take that will help guard your privacy.

When using Opera on a shared user account, the following features may raise privacy concerns, and you should consider whether you want to disable them, avoid them, or use them with caution:

• E-mail, Usenet news, newsfeeds, and chat (Tools > Mail and chat accounts and Feeds > Manage feeds to disable)
• The Wand (Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Security to disable or set master password, and Tools > Preferences > Wand to manage stored passwords)
• Auto-completion of forms (Tools > Preferences > Wand should be kept empty or used for generic, non-sensitive information only)
• Saved sessions and "Continue from last time" (use Tools > Preferences > General to set Opera to start with your home page and disable the start-up dialog)
• User JavaScript (use Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content > JavaScript options to clear the "My JavaScript files" field). Note that User JavaScript is not loaded on secure pages.