Getting someone else's browsing history

Question

If I was interested in knowing what someone else was browsing, could I boot up to a Linux LiveUSB and copy the file off of their computer where Internet Explorer saves history, brink it back to my machine (Linux), and somehow scan through that file for a list of urls visited?

Solution

I'm not sure if this would work in Linux (as they are Windows applications, they could be run under Wine) but BrowsingHistoryView, by NirSoft, should do the trick. The following are the relevant properties of the software:

• Reads the history data of 4 different Web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari) and displays the browsing history of all these Web browsers in one table.

• Allows you to watch the browsing history of all user profiles in a running system, as well as to get the browsing history from external hard drive.

For Internet Explorer and most recent Windows versions, the history file (Index.dat) is located at:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History

Where %userprofile% is a variable that redirects to C:\Users\ -username-

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With this being said, I would advise against using any data one may find within those history files (at least, in the way it is perceived). Besides being (as pointed out by mpdc) ethically questionable and, in a way, a breach of privacy, a good technical reason for this are that ad and popup pages also appear on the History, creating a sort of false positives. Also, History entries can be deleted.

Comments

[Kevin Versfeld]

Why? Seems a problematic ethically.

[ᔕᖺᘎᕊ]

So, putting it simply, you want to view the Windows Internet Explorer History file on your other Linux computer?

[user339365]

Sounds like what I am trying to do, yes.

[dave heywood]

What Operating System is on the machine ?