Clear your traces on a shared computer DEADBOLT

What gets cleared, precisely

Everything this site has stored in this browser, on this device, for this origin: local storage, session storage, every IndexedDB database, and every cache the service worker has written. The counts above are read live, so you can see what is there before you clear it and see it go afterwards rather than trusting a message that says it worked.

That is the whole scope, and it is a narrower scope than the button sounds. It clears obscuraos.com and nothing else. The browser cannot reach into another site's storage and this page does not try. Anything you had open in another tab, another site, or another browser profile is untouched.

Export anything you want to keep first. There is no undo, because the only copy was the one in this browser: that is the point of a site that does not have your files on a server, and it cuts both ways.

What a shared computer still remembers about you

Clearing the site's storage does not clear the machine, and on a genuinely shared computer the machine is the problem. Still there afterwards:

• Browser history and the address bar. The next person types o and the site appears. Clearing history is the browser's own job, in its settings, and it is a separate action.
• The downloads folder and the downloads list. Anything you exported is a file on that disk with a name on it. Move it or delete it, and remember that a deleted file is usually recoverable until the space is reused.
• Anything the operating system keeps. Recent documents, thumbnails, clipboard history, a printer's spool, temporary files written by whatever opened your download.
• The network. A managed or corporate machine is typically logging which sites were visited, from the network rather than from the browser, and nothing done inside the browser affects that.

If what you are protecting is serious, the reliable approach is not to clean up afterwards but to leave nothing: a private window, which keeps nothing once it closes, or a device that is yours. This page is the best available answer to “I had to use the library computer”, not a way of making the library computer safe.

The cover screen

The cover is a plain full-screen panel you can raise instantly, by the button or by pressing Escape twice within about half a second. Tap it to come back. It is for the moment somebody walks up behind you, and it does exactly one thing: it stops what is on screen being read from across a room.

It is not a lock. The work is still open underneath, the tab is still the tab, and anyone who touches the screen is back in. Treat it as a curtain rather than a door. If you need the work genuinely shut, KEYS and JOURNAL keep their contents encrypted at rest, and CAPSULE puts a passphrase on anything you have to leave behind.