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Comment by elktea | Hacker News Reader

Looks good. I've added it to my ever growing list of privacy extensions:

  * Privacy Badger
  * Disconnect
  * CanvasBlocker

Can anyone recommend any more?

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Expire history by days - removes your history when it's X days old, prevents storing too much data about your visits habits https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/expire-histor...

Clean links - removes redirects from search engines, facebook, twitter etc to hide a fact that you clicked a link, google doesn't know what link you clicked from search results, so if you block GA, it can't track you https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clean-links/

I personally use this triple combo :

HTTPS Everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

uBlock Origin : https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

uMatrix : https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

I have used Noscript, AdBlockPlus and Ghostery before but found they where lacking functionality, flexibility and performance. I used Privacy Badger too but if I remember well, it is based on the same engine as ABP and suffers for the same performance problems.

uBlock Origin's advanced mode does pretty much the same thing as uMatrix.

Ditto except uMatrix

What exactly does it do?

uMatrix provides a tabular view sorted by host featuring toggleable category columns e.g. Dis/Allow iframe, script etc. It's granular client side resource whitelisting.

uBlock Origin does that too, just need to turn on Advanced Mode via options.

uMatrix offers more granularity. You can choose exactly what each third-party site can do in terms of cookies, CSS, images, plugins, javascript, XHR(!), frames and media (audio, video, pdf, etc).

After years of using uMatrix (formerly HTTP Switchboard), many sites "just works" wrt Youtube, Vimeo and similar even without first-party javascript enabled.

I've considered sharing parts of my global ruleset so others can just copy-paste the sections/sites they want to whitelist without having to discover what's required themselves.

Which engine? This is new to me. I thought ABP is so slow because the code is crappy (thats also what i see when i look at the code)

The more privacy, the more of a unique fingerprint your browser has, the less privacy.

Check out panoptoclick[1], to see your fingerprint. Someone should make a series of common groups, and those who care should stick to just those.

[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Considering the amount of variables that contribute to the browser fingerprint, you would be forced to conclude that the only way to prevent being so unique is to run a browser in a vanilla VM (although the OS is already a variable in itself).

I think this is a topic that gets discussed by (for example) the Firefox developers, but I get the feeling that this is one of the hardest problems to fix.

I would like to see a browser mode akin to the privacy mode most browsers feature that reduces the number of identifying variables (at the cost of features). So instead of telling the world that my time zone is CET and I prefer English (GB) as language, it would select a random time zone and locale (although this does inconveniently mean that sites might suddenly serve me content in Portuguese).

Come to think of it, TOR Browser probably does a couple of these things. Disabling Javascript is surely the biggest factor, although that does make the modern web pretty much unusable.

> Considering the amount of variables that contribute to the browser fingerprint, you would be forced to conclude that the only way to prevent being so unique is to run a browser in a vanilla VM (although the OS is already a variable in itself).

It'd have to be more like a VM running the OS with the highest market share (Windows), the browser with the highest market share (Internet Explorer), with the most common language used, with the most common time zone of users of the site you're accessing (varies by site and time of day), etc.

Anything else and you could stand out in the crowd. Using Linux or OS X, for example, really make fingerprinting easier for sites, which is quite disturbing.

Randomizing the values of certain attributes, as you've described, may help a lot if more people adopt it and make fingerprinting a futile exercise to those using it. :) If the people doing the fingerprinting see millions being successfully tracked with just a handful they're unable to track, they wouldn't even care. It's kinda like ad blocking. A few do it and it's not seen as a problem. If the majority does it, then the sites take notice. For a larger scale effect, browser makers should get into this. Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft and Google, in that order (with Opera somewhere in the middle), may be interested in thwarting browser fingerprinting.

Mozilla yes, Apple and Microsoft maybe but I'm unsure, Google I don't think so. They're the ones selling the most ads.

Maybe you need to turn it around and change the fingerprint every minute? Would that help?

A lot of factors that make up the total fingerprint have an influence on how sites react to your browser, so I would have it change per-session and per-domain to prevent weirdness.

I like your idea, but wouldn't it be easier to create a constantly changing unique fingerprint?

Your fingerprint might become more unique but at least only 2 instead of 60 sites get to inspect it.

Request filters: These add-ons filter requests to 3rd party hosts, effectively blocking everything (if set to default to deny all). Most sites, other than web applications or ecommerce, only need to connect to at most a single remote host to pull down their CSS files; the next most common requirement is Google Hosted Libraries.

* RequestPolicy: No longer developed, but still works for me

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...

* RequestPolicy Continued

https://requestpolicycontinued.github.io/

* Policeman: Haven't tried it, but AFAIK it also filters by data type (e.g., allow media requests from x.com to y.com, but not scripts)

https://github.com/futpib/policeman

I like Random Agent Spoofer.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-...

uMatrix if you are a control freak. I usually stand it for two weeks before giving up. And yup, I've trained it to know the sites I regularly visit. Thing is, I also surf NEW sites all the time.

Now I use Self Destructing Cookies, uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere. That works just fine without taking the fun out of the web.

I've found NoScript a bigger part of my browsing habits lately. I wait for the moment when a site just goes haywire, maxing CPU cores, at which point I just nix its script privileges. This isn't nearly as disruptive as distrusting all websites.

uBlock Origin and uMatrix allow you to do this. Just kill third-party resources.

There's really no need to use both Privacy Badger and Disconnect as they both do pretty much the same thing. I'd ditch them both and just use uBlock Origin with the "Privacy" filter lists enabled.

I thought Disconnect was based on preexisting lists and Privacy Badger automatically worked out which sites seemed to be setting cookies and using them for tracking across sites. I'll need to look into it more, thanks.

You're correct. I'm not sure where people get this idea that Privacy Badger's supposed "lists" are included in uBlock, but I've seen it around here a lot. Personally I use both.

CsFire: Protects against Cross-Site Request Forgeries (CSRF) by stripping authetication information from cross-domain requests.

https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/software/CsFire/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/csfire/

CsFire is the result of academic research, available in the following publications: CsFire: Transparent client-side mitigation of malicious cross-domain requests (published at the International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems 2010) and Automatic and precise client-side protection against CSRF attacks (published at the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security 2011)

There are also about:config settings that improves privacy,

//no 3p cookies

network.cookie.cookieBehavior;1

//less referer headers

network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy;2

network.http.referer.spoofSource;true

network.http.referer.trimmingPolicy;2

//etc

beacon.enabled;false

dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled;false

dom.enable_performance;false

dom.network.enabled;false

dom.battery.enabled;false

dom.vibrator.enabled;false

dom.storage.enabled;false

dom.indexedDB.enabled;false

>dom.indexedDB.enabled;false

From what I have read that can break quite a few things in Firefox, becarefule

* Self destructing cookies

* Better privacy

* uBlock with EasyPrivacy list

* Https everywhere

Self destructing cookies

Chrome gives you the option to delete cookies on quit and has exceptions for whitelisting, is "Self destructing cookies" any different?

Firefox lets you do that natively too. Self destructing cookies deletes the cookies after you close the browser tab, not the entire window. If the browser doesn't provide complete isolation between tabs, this'll make it so the cookie isn't there to harvest from. You can set each site to tab/browser/never too.

Self destructing cookies

This looks amazing. Any particular setting one should be aware of or must change to keep things less annoying and smooth?

I turned off the notifications. Didn't need to know every time a cookie blows up.

This is good, one could add Certificate Patrol to combat MITM attacks.

I use the Perspectives extension for this purpose.

There are duckduckGo privacy settings you can set. I'm not a big fan of a cloud store for your settings and thankfully duckduckGo allows for settings parameters in the url[0]. You can do things like require POST instead of GET, redirecting, forcing https etc. Once you get your search and privacy settings how you like them, take the resulting url and make an openSearch plugin out of it, manually or with something like my mycroft project[1]. Now any searches use your settings, no account/cloud settings needed. It's then easy to throw in every browser you use. Technically a plugin.

PS. If you need a favicon from any site for a plugin or otherwise, easiest way I've found is https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=duckduckgo.com. Will grab it from wheverever the sysadmin decided to put it.

[0]https://duckduckgo.com/params [1]http://mycroftproject.com/submitos.html

I wish their was a way to isolate third party cookies/html5 data to SiteVisited/ThirdPartySite instead of the current ThirdPartySite model. The third party site could track you within the site visited but you would appear as a different user when visiting a different site. There would be no way to track you across websites.

There's no need to use Disconnect anymore. Disconnect's list is now included in Firefox's native tracking protection feature (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-pbm), and is also available through uBlock Origin subscriptions.

Use Tor (or just TBB) if you want proper privacy. All the other add-ons are just plugging the leaky holes that is modern browser privacy.

"Privacy Settings"

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-setti...

It wouldn't hurt to get SQLite Manager and periodically check what's in the browser databases. For example, if you buy anything online you might find your credit card number in there.

I'm using:

HTTPS: Everywhere

uMatrix (used to use NoScript, but I prefer this now)

Self-Destructing Cookies

Better Privacy

https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate

Ghostery

Don't they sell your blocking data?

They claim to only sell your data if you opt-in to something called "GhostRank." [1]. It's proprietary software so there's no way to actually confirm that though.

There's really no reason for privacy conscious individuals to use Ghostery when uBlock Origin can do the exact same thing.

[1] https://www.ghostery.com/intelligence/consumer-blog/consumer...

In addition to asking you a series of invasive questions when you uninstall — which, I suspect means they sell that data once you're no longer using the software.

Try uBlock Origin instead. It's faster, lighter, and replaced both Adblock Plus and Ghostery for me.

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