Internet Explorer 8.0: InPrivate Filtering

Always enable

Internet Explorer 8.0's InPrivate Filtering option can be toggled on or off but it won't stay enabled after closing the browser. Open IE8, click the Tools menu, then click Inprivate Filtering to enable it (a check mark should appear on the left side of the entry). When you close and re-open IE8, the check mark is gone. To tweak this, you need to do some Registry editing. Open Registry Editor by typing Regedit.exe or Regedt32.exe on the Start menu, Run dialog. Now that Registry Editor is running, navigate through by clicking in order:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER
• Software
• Microsoft
• Internet Explorer
• Safety
• PrivacIE

Should look like this on the status bar:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Safety\PrivacIE

If the PrivacIE key is not available, you need to create it yourself. Once inside of that key, create a DWORD Value of StartMode, then give it a value of any of the following: 0, 1.

• 0 = always off as default behavior
• 1 = always on as default behavior

Or you can create for yourself a handy REG file for easy future re-use. Open Notepad, then type the following below (or simply copy-paste). After you are done with the editing, save it using "Save As...". A dialog box should open asking you to provide a filename (File name:), the file type (Save as type:), and the encoding (Encoding:).  For the filename, just type anything you like. For the file type, you can either choose Text Documents (*.txt) or All files. If you choose Text Documents (*.txt), you will need to rename the extension of your newly created text file form .txt to .reg. If you choose All files, you can provide right away the .reg extension. Now for the encoding, pick Unicode. Finally, double-click your newly created reg file and a box should appear asking you if you want to add the information of it into the Registry, click Yes.

Type or copy-paste this to your reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Safety\PrivacIE] "StartMode"=dword:00000001

You may want to create more reg files, each for the different behaviors. Simply change the dword:00000001 to dword:00000000.

• dword:00000000 = always off as default behavior
• dword:00000001 = always on as default behavior

If you want to easily restore InPrivate Filtering to its default behavior, just delete the Start Mode entry or the whole PrivacIE key form the Registry.

Location of database

Open Folder Options from Control Panel. Click View tab, click the Show hidden files and folders radio button and uncheck Hide protected operating system files (recommended). For Windows XP, open Windows Explorer and navigate to Documents and Settings folder, then your Username folder, then PrivacIE which contains an index.dat file. Copy this dat file or the whole PrivacIE folder to your backup locations for future re-use. This dat file grows up in time as  IE8 accumulates data for its InPrivate Filtering.

Exporting your own accumulated entries

If you don't like the above method of re-using your InPrivate Filtering database, you might as well export it as xml. Open IE8, click the Tools menu, then click Inprivate Filtering Settings, and a new window should appear. Here, click the Choose content to block or allow radio button, then select all or any of the entries you want either as blocked or allowed. You can highlight multiple entries by holding the shift key. If you don't manually do this, the entries won't appear on the next step. Now click Advanced Setting near the bottom of the window to open up a new window yet again named Manage Add-ons. Here you should see once more those entries you previously marked as either blocked or allowed. At the bottom of this window are 3 buttons: Import, Export, and Delete all. Click Export then type a filename of your choice. Now that you have an xml backup copy, you can import this in the future using the Import button instead. Note that you can also import other people's xml files too. You might like anony101's own at his IE8 InPrivate filter from adblock plus list post at dslreports.com.