Hacker News Reader

Comment by shock | Hacker News Reader

> I was on the Google homepage today on my iPhone and was getting popups advertising Chrome (on the homepage!) and then again in the search results advertising the Google app. I changed my default to DDG right then and there.

I just switched my search engine from DDG to StartPage because I was on a DDG results page and there was a pop-up advertising their app. Why does a search engine need a phone app? Seriously!

View on HN

It’s a privacy focused browser. Considering all iOS browsers use the same rendering engine and most people are on DDG for privacy reasons, it might be worth considering.

Honestly, if you’re concerned about being tracked then you should ignore adds directly related to the webpage your on. Advertising yoga mats on a yoga website don’t take insight into you. Advertising yoga mats on a personal finance site after you visited the yoga webpage is another story.

Aside from using an ad blocker another thing I do to combat that is not re-using browser sessions. If I'm visiting a yoga website, I'll quit the browser and relaunch before I visit the personal finance website (especially then). My browser is configured to clear all history and site data when I quit, so I start with a clean blank slate. I quit/relaunch my browser dozens of times a day.

That’s both inefficient and ineffective vs browser fingerprinting, so you might want to just use a privacy focused browser behind a VPN to hide your IP address.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com