You need to prep a flash drive, throw it in your bag and then hope you never need to use it.
Of course, using portable apps and live operating systems requires some forethought. Ensuring that none of your personal information ever touches the public machine’s permanent storage at all! Clean Up After Yourself
If you are allowed to, you can also boot a live operating system from a flash drive or optical disc. This has the advantage of not requiring a reboot. When it comes to skipping out on the public machine’s operating system, you can use portable virtual machine software, running a clean OS image of something like Linux.
You may also want to add a portable browser and portable office suite. So you can load up portable applications on a flash drive and plug it into the public machine.įirst among these should be a portable antivirus package. These are special applications that don’t require installation, are self-contained and run from any media. The first part of this puzzle comes in the form of portable apps. Even better, you can avoid using the operating system in its entirety! While using privacy mode on public browsers is a good piece of common sense in a pinch, it’s better to avoid using any of the software on that computer at all. Which means you should really only use public computers as a last resort if its an emergency. These surprises are aimed at skimming information from you in a variety of ways. Not just because the typical public mouse and keyboard is a bio-hazard, although that’s another issue, but because they could have left all sorts of nasty surprises for you. The other main risk of these machines comes from people who have used it before you sat down. That’s a real problem because with modern computing you’re leaving information left and right like digital dandruff. With a public computer whatever information you leave on the machine is waiting for the next user to do with as they please. With your own personal devices you can count on pass codes, passwords and strong disk encryption to prevent anyone else from getting your sensitive information. The main problem with public computers is, well, they’re public. First off, let’s clarify the exact risk these computers pose.
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