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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

I'm a dev on a marketing team and we build all our own AdTech instead of buy products, for the most part.

The (mostly young) online paid ad guys are way more paranoid than the old conspiracy theorist hacker types I grew up around. All we do is talk about how advanced the tech around attribution is, all the data DSPs are collecting about you, etc. All of these guys seem to have an attitude where they're making a deal with the devil and they want to make as much cash as they can before retiring to some island off the grid. It's really bizarre.

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Those 'after me the deluge (French saying)' people are the worst. Same as rich people fucking up the globe but massively buying 'escape hatches' in New Zealand. If you're that kind of person, you should be burned at the stake.

Do they use any specific tools or practices to protect themselves?

There's dozens of tools around for this, but I recommend this fairly simple combination:

- uBlock Origin - just straight up blocking ads solves the problem, some lists also block other kinds of trackers, it also has an excellent advanced mode feature that can be used to whitelist

- EFF's Privacy Badger - blocks or trashes tracking cookies automatically, includes social blocking too

- HTTPS Everywhere - force SSL on with as many sites as possible

- Consider referrer control extensions too, though they may break some sites

Other tools in this field include Ghostery and Disconnect, but Ghostery has some sketchy ownership and Disconnect seemed to break random sites - plus most if not all of the stuff they catch will already be blocked between uBlock Origin with privacy lists and Privacy Badger.

I second uBlock origin and Privacy Badger, as they have (to my knowledge) no commercial interests. As OP said, many other extensions/tools actually belong -through intermediaries- to data collection companies, so they might protect you from some threats but actually spy on you as well. Ghostery allows you to opt out of their data collection though, so it seems that the tool is at least partially trustworthy.

Interesting list of tools, in that it implies browsers are the only things to be protected.

I was primarily talking about browsers because web ads were the concern - and also probably the most common way to be spyed on.

But for desktop and mobile I can't endorse enough running a software firewall with outgoing blocking and active prompting - many of these will also let your block things from injecting into other applications, adding themselves to startup, etc. XPrivacy on mobile works wonders. Outpost used to be my recommendation on Windows, but it's unfortunately dead now, so I've been running ZoneAlarm lately, which does a decent job. If someone knows something better, please let me know.

I'd like to add Self-Destructing Cookies to your list.

I believe that's similar to what Privacy Badger achieves, is it not?

Privacy Badger strips cookies from some third-party requests. SDC clears cookies (and LocalStorage) from all non-whitelisted domains after some time passes. Effectively overrides cookie expiration time globally.

Privacy Badger is made specifically to just block tracking cookies without impacting the user experience so it tends to be my recommendation. I believe it will indeed do local storage too as of 2.0 though I could be mistaken about that.

In the past I've had my browser dump everything on exit, every time I exit, but that can be a major inconvenience. SDC sounds like an interesting middle ground though.

>In the past I've had my browser dump everything on exit, every time I exit

Me too, until I realized I often leave my browser open for days and weeks, especially at work.

Ghostery has recently been aquired by Cliqz¹, which is a German company and presumably will have to abide by German law in regards to data protection.

① https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-acquire...

None of them will protect you from apps on your phone listening for tracking codes in videos/sound playing elsewhere.

Yes, but XPrivacy will do that.

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