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Comment by jradd | Hacker News Reader

Wrangling 3rd party application access to platform providers' suite (ios, android, browser extensions).

Cookies seem to be the majority of the aggregate identity/behavior data, which you can use various rules in the protocol to limit tracking to some extent.

I've found that opting out on a regular basis of the large adverts for a little extra peace of mind.

uBlock/uMatrix Origin, ghostery, duck.com, dns encryption, vpn, ip6.

removing old wireless access points from history/cache and disabling nfc, blutooth advertisement.

removing duplicate/shared passwords from your various authentication providers and using keypass or a secure password scheme that is easy to remember.

Log out manually of various applications such as facebook, google, microsoft, etc.

Contacts list. Clean em' up.

Keep your phone and hands sanitary at all times :)

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one thing that irks me is ppl blindly suggesting duckduckgo over google

DDG is fucking horrible

It doesn't work. I'm almost always going back to Google.

There should be a service that searches Google for you behind 7 proxies.

That is searx. Self hosted and fully randomizing. I use it, and it works very well for general web searches

Image search is subtly broken in the packaged releases tho, so you'll either have to hit up google image search or use the git version

nice find. that is exactly what I was looking for.

DDG at the end of the day are no more disposed to exposing their users at the behest of the gov than FAANG

Or just learn how to craft search queries on DDG (instead of google assuming it for you). Nothing wrong with DDG. Lot of people like it. Why shouldn't anyone suggest it to others?

DDG is unusable from keyboard alone. Whenever battery in my mouse runs out, I have to switch to something else. It's one of those web apps where designers disabled focus outlines, because they don't find them pretty.

They have their own shortcuts for the basics: j/k or arrows for jumping between entries, (ctrl+)enter to open (in background tab). Doesn't excuse hiding focus outlines though.

startpage.com as far as I know is a wrapper around Google results.

The only way to surf/search without Google identifying you is to use a cloudbrowser. Because you are using a VM and a disposable browser, any search engine is getting incorrect info about you and your searches. It makes Google a private search engine. www.tracefree.com

I've been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for almost 2 years now. Never had a problem. There were a couple times early on when I was like "these results are bad, lemme check Google", only to find out Google's results were pretty much the same. DDG just buys results from other providers, so their results are pretty much always going to be acceptable.

Edit: Just wanted to say I'm not try to discount your experience, I just don't want to dissuade future people from trying out other search engines, when I think switching search engines is one of the biggest and easiest privacy wins a lot of people can do.

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