Do you want to hide your browsing history, download history, passwords, bookmarks and search queries from other users who share your computer? Then, create Multiple Google Chrome Profiles (Separate User profiles) – one for each user who shares your computer.
By creating separate chrome profiles for each user, you can ensure that the browsing history stays safe and private and thus nobody comes to know what pages were visited and what queries were searched during a browsing session.
How Multiple Chrome Profiles feature effectively hides browsing history?
Multiple Chrome Profiles is a simple and an easy feature to understand. For instance, if there are three members in your family who share a single computer, then you can create three separate user profiles for each one of them in order to keep browsing the history hidden from each member.
Once you have separate profiles created, then each member should insist on using the same user profile (to open the Chrome browser) that is created for him every time he wants to browse the web. In this way every member’s browsing history will be hidden from each other and thus each browsing session will always be private and safe. The complete procedure for creating multiple chrome profiles is explained below.
An In-Built Google Chrome feature that creates different users
The 16th version of the Google Chrome browser (and later versions) is incorporated with an in-built feature that helps you in creating different chrome users.
By creating multiple chrome users using this in-built feature, you can only ensure that your passwords, theme settings and bookmarks are not visible to others. For instance, if you have the FBPhoto Zoom app installed in your profile, then that app will not be visible in your sibling’s user profile.
But however, one disadvantage or a limitation of using this method is that, it still does not ensure that your browsing history is hidden from others even after you have logged out. That is, anybody who uses the browser can easily switch between different users (see the Screenshot below) and instantly they can have access to all your browsing history and search queries.
So, instead of just creating different users, you can create separate user profiles or Chrome profiles for each user who shares your computer so that the browsing history, bookmarks, download history, passwords and search history will be hidden from all other users.
There isn’t any in-built feature available in the Chrome browser to create multiple user profiles, but you can achieve it manually. Find out below how to create different Chrome profiles manually.
How to create Multiple Chrome Profiles
1) Open your Google chrome browser and delete all your browsing history (complete). To completely delete your browsing history, press CTRL+SHIFT+DELETE keys together and then click on Clear browsing data tab in the dialog box thus opened (see screenshot below).
2) Now, navigate to Windows Explorer to find the User Data folder of your Google Chrome browser.
The User Data folder will be located in the following path
For Windows XP users
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data
For Windows Vista and 7 users
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data
3) Now, inside the User data folder, select the folder called “Default”. Create a duplicate copy of the same Default folder inside the User Data folder itself and rename the duplicate copy something such as My_Name (see the screenshot below).
4) In the next step, we have to reset the new ‘My_Name’ User profile to the default factory settings. To do so, open the command prompt and run the following command.
chrome.exe –user-data-dir=”..\User Data\My_Name” -first-run
5) As soon as you run the above command, a new user profile in the form of My_Name will be created inside the User Data folder and also another Chrome browser icon will be displayed on your desktop which represents the newly created user profile. Rename the shortcut icon to something such as my_personal_chrome.
So, from here on, always use the newly created chrome profile to browse the web so that all your browsing history, download history, bookmarks, search queries and passwords are invisible to any of your family members who share the computer.
If you find the above method a little bit difficult to execute, then you can have your Google chrome browser always start in Incognito mode so that none of your browsing session will be recorded.
Read more about the Incognito mode browsing on Google chrome.