Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

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I prefer this setup:

- install Cookie Auto-Delete (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...)

- set it to delete all local data for all domains, 15 seconds after its last tab is closed

- create a Firefox container for untrusted apps you can't get rid of (e.g Gmail, Facebook) and set these domains to open in this "untrusted" container by default

- set Cookie Auto-Delete not to delete the data for this particular container

- whitelist the few domains you trust so that you can keep their sessions open in the Default container

Result: No need to use a secondary browser or to install special "Google/Facebook/etc Containers for Firefox". You always browse the Web incognito by default! Only when you visit some particular webpages do you enter a custom container that keep your personal data separate from other activities.

This has worked nicely for 2+ years, with other essential extensions such as uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere and Decentraleyes.

I ended up using the exact same solution! The only annoying thing is that I want "untrusted apps" to open external links in a new DEFAULT tab so that I don't carry over the whitelisted cookies but that requires manual "right click > open in" with the default setup.

That doesn't prevent shit. These companies have invested far more man power to track you than you have to protect yourself. They can use a variety of methods to still track you. And they will. Think IP address based tracking.

Note: none of this prevents tracking unless you also have fingerprinting turned off, which makes things a whole lot less useful. For example, if you like Date.now() to be reliable, and you want to about:config your way to locking down finger printing: too bad. It's one or the other.

>Note: none of this prevents tracking unless you also have fingerprinting turned off

It does prevent tracking of websites that don't do fingerprinting. The best is the enemy of the good!

Yeah except in this case Google is the enemy of even the moderately useful. Find any website you like. Odds are it uses google analytics and/or google ads, and good news: that website absolutely uses fingerprinting, even if they didn't implement it "themselves".

The only thing that's annoying is that with GDPR I have to do 3 clicks on every website. What I want is an addon where I can mute / suppress the cookie overlay.

Though I guess with this setup I can do "accept cookies" knowing that they will shortly be deleted.

ublock Origin does it. You can subscribe to filter lists like "Fanboy’s Cookiemonster". And you can manually remove annoying elements (e.g overlay, banners, etc).

I can't skip GDPR page redirects, though.

Why bother with installing anything?

Run your browser in private mode for everything except a few websites you trust.

Done.

… all of which is futile as long as NSA records everything and their databases will leak one day.

Anonymity will always be greater than privacy. What I'm saying is that there should be a focus on being anonymous without a care (almost) of what you're doing.

I just think it's a futile kind of paranoia. Your anomalous behavior puts you on some list. Writing about it here puts you on some list. As every admin knows so well, spying on user data is much too easy for that not being done all over. We'd need to tear down large scale digital infrastructure to make even a dent into the problem of massive abuse potential. Deleting cookies is cope.

Depending on the context, platform, and data, de-anonymization is almost trivial to perform. Worse, someone can replicate your patterns and masquerade as you (thinking about that "lodestar" opinion where people were debating whether it was Pence or not).

Why live if you're mortal?

A possible threat does not mean a probable one.

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