[Tips] Tweak Opera Web Browser Settings to Improve Your Privacy
UPDATED on Oct 15, 2018: Tutorial updated with new options and screenshots matching with newer versions of Opera web browser.
Personally I use Mozilla Firefox web browser at work and home but there are many AskVG readers who use Opera web browser. So today in this tutorial, I’m going to share a few tips for Opera which will help you in improving your privacy while using the web browser.
Actually every web browser comes with a few built-in options which help the web browser in improving page load performance but sometimes these options may also send your usage data and statistics to the web browser company automatically without your knowledge. So its always better to disable these options if you want complete privacy.
If you are an Opera user and want to improve your privacy, you should definitely check out following simple steps:
1. First of all open Opera web browser, click on Opera button present at the top-left corner of Opera window and then click on Settings. You can also directly open Opera Settings page by pressing ALT+P keys together.
2. By default Opera opens your last browsing session upon startup. That means if you were browsing a website and you close the web browser and after some time another person opens Opera web browser, it’ll automatically open that website and the other person will automatically know what website you were vising last time.
It might become a privacy issue if you don’t want other people to know what website you visited last time. Don’t worry! You can disable this feature using following steps:
Scroll down on Settings page and under “On startup” section, you can select the option according to your requirements. It would be set to “Continue where you left off” by default. You can change it to “Open the start page” or “Open a specific page or set of pages” options.
Now Opera will never restore your last visited websites upon startup.
3. Now scroll down to bottom and click on “Advanced” link. It’ll show advanced settings options.
4. Under “Privacy and security” section, disable following options:
- Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar (More Info)
- Use a prediction service to load pages more quickly
- Allow sites to check if you have payment methods saved
- Automatically send crash reports to Opera
- Help improve Opera by sending feature usage information
- Help improve Opera services by sending data about trending websites
- Fetch images for suggested sources in News, based on history
- Send news usage data to improve personalization (More Info)
If you want, you can also enable following option to improve privacy:
- Send a ‘Do Not Track’ request with your browsing traffic
5. Now under “Start page” section, disable following options:
- Receive promoted Speed Dials and Bookmarks (More Info)
- Show Speed Dial suggestions
6. That’s it. Once you follow the above mentioned steps, you’ll have better privacy settings in Opera web browser.