Browse safely. Leave instantly.

Safari's private tabs are not saved to your history. Open one before you start reading, not after.

• Tap the tabs button (the two squares), tap Private, then tap + for a new tab.
• Read what you need to in that tab.
• When you finish, go back to the tabs button and close every private tab you opened. They stay open until you close them, including after the phone restarts.

One thing people miss: the app switcher keeps a picture of whatever was on screen. After you close the tabs, swipe up on Safari in the app switcher so the preview goes too.

If you already read something in a normal tab, open Settings, find Safari, and use Clear History and Website Data. That clears every tab, so it is all or nothing.

Chrome's Incognito tabs are not saved to your history. Open one before you start reading.

• Tap the three-dot menu, then New Incognito tab.
• Read what you need to in that tab.
• When you finish, close every Incognito tab. Android shows a notification while any are open, and tapping it closes them all at once.

If you already read something in a normal tab, use the three-dot menu to delete your browsing data, choosing a time range that covers it, and include both browsing history and cookies and site data.

Worth turning off while you are there: search and address-bar suggestions. Otherwise a site you visited once can reappear as a suggestion when someone else starts typing.

On a computer other people use, a private or incognito window is the minimum, and a guest profile is better: it keeps history, sign-ins and saved passwords out of the main profile entirely.

• Open a private or incognito window from your browser's menu before you start.
• If the browser offers a guest profile, use that instead.
• Close the window when you finish, rather than leaving it open.
• If you were signed in to the browser itself, sign out. Browser accounts sync history between devices, so a page opened here can surface on a phone later.

Downloads and bookmarks are the usual slip: a private window does not save your history, but anything you download or bookmark stays after it closes.

A VPN is not the answer to this. A VPN hides where your traffic goes from whoever runs the network. It does nothing about the device in front of you: history, cached pages, saved passwords and any monitoring software are all still there.

And the honest limit on all of this: if someone may have installed something to watch the device, none of the steps above will help. A device that person has never had access to is the safer option, such as a computer at a public library. You can also call us instead of reading anything at all.