At this stage of uBlock Origin, is there actually any point of using other extensions of you’re just a regular Joe “browsing the web”?
While there is likely to be overlap between the various advertising/tracker lists and Privacy Badger, regardless of whether you enable learning locally, Privacy Badger can automatically discover new trackers that list-based blockers don’t know about.
Besides automatic tracker blocking, Privacy Badger comes with privacy features like click-to-activate replacements for potentially useful trackers (video players, comments sections like Disqus, etc.), and link cleaning on Facebook and Google.
Privacy Badger is also a political tool. By using Privacy Badger, you support the Electronic Frontier Foundation [1]. Privacy Badger sends the Global Privacy Control [2] signal to opt you out of data sharing and selling, and the Do Not Track [3] signal to tell companies not to track you. If trackers ignore your wishes, Privacy Badger will learn to block them. The idea isn't to block all advertising but rather to promote a better Web.
[1] https://www.eff.org/ [2] https://globalprivacycontrol.org/ [3] https://www.eff.org/issues/do-not-track
Has there been any study as to how closely Privacy Badger converges to list-based blockers like uBlock Origin given enough time? Is that at all a metric you use in development?
There are a few academic studies that note that algorithmic and manual approaches to tracker blocking tend to compliment each other, for example:
https://kevin.borgolte.me/files/pdf/www2020-privacy-extensio...
Do any significant disadvantages of Privacy Badger stand out to you, contrasted with uBlock Origin? The biggest problem I can think of is that uBlock Origin will immediately prevent me from loading content that could be dangerous, while Privacy Badger has to visit dangerous content enough times to learn to block it, which is less good for security.
On the other hand the big advantage to me for Privacy Badger is that it doesn't depend on manually-curated lists. uBlock Origin nicely wraps the block lists but when it comes down to it you are giving control over your browsing experience to the random volunteers building these lists, which, who knows? Though I'm not accusing anyone of anything.
Regarding having to see dangerous content multiple times:
- Privacy Badger gets remote learning at this point from Badger Sett, so most common trackers should be accounted for.
- Privacy Badger isn't so much a security tool as a privacy tool. Yes, blocking trackers is good for security, but it's not the primary objective. The primary objective is to stop non-consensual pervasive tracking. In this light, having to see tracking a few times before deciding to block it is a reasonable approach.
[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/privacy-badger-changin...
All extensions that modify page state are fingerprintable. Privacy Badger's local learning creates the possibility of additional fingerprinting. As discussed in the blog post you linked to, we decided that we can deliver most of the benefits of automatic learning without local learning. We further believe that local learning can offer benefits that outweigh the risk of additional fingerprinting, which is why we kept the ability to re-enable this feature at the user's discretion. Does this answer your question?
Nice. I thought the local learning (which was kinda the main appeal of PB) was dead after reading that post. Glad that isn't the case.
Why would I allow all websites I visit to store things on your computer? I have about 20~ domains whitelisted (which I've added and maintained over years). The rest will be forced to forget me and not be allowed to create profiles and sell my interests and habits to the highest bidder.
Works great with Firefox Multi-Account Containers: this lets me be stayed logged into an account (eg Google) but only for a subset of services (Google Drive, Gmail) – not Google Search: why would I want Google to keep an history of my queries?
Works great with https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu (I really don't care about them since they're auto deleted anyway). I wish uBlock, Cookie Auto Delete and I don't care about cookies would be installed by default with Firefox.
private browsing i do as in, i start my pc, firefox starts on its own so i do ctrl+shift+p. then i go about my day using this window and more such windows.
whenever i have to wind down for the day or want to get rid of a session, i just close the windows and i am clean.
i understand people use cookies auto delete like you mentioned but for my use case, i dont even bother. i can sign in, do what i need to do and i dont care about signing out or even being tracked across sessions because sessions are not persistent across logins
In Privacy & Security settings set it to clear all browsing data when Firefox closes, and simply add exceptions for whichever domains you want. This also has the advantage of clearing some things CAD is unable to due to limite of the WebExtension APIs.
2. Exceptions in Firefox preferences don't support regular expressions, so you need to whitelist both https:// and http:// and you can't tune things for subdomains. CAD is much more powerful, with custom rules (*.google.com), white and greylists, etc https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/wiki/...
3. CAD has the option to keep a log of deletions and restore the deleted data/cookies.
4. And CAD supports containers, so you can open tabs of the same URL but only be logged in the one you want (multiple Gmail accounts but remain incognito in Search, Maps, Youtube and other Google properties).
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/02/23/total-cookie-pr...
> Protects you against tracking through "free", centralized, content delivery.
Is it not still relevant as long as all sites don't choose to host their own dependencies, as recommended in the article you linked?
This add-on shaped the privacy-positive landscape for browsers upon it's release, but the features have be made obsolete with the latest browser isolation and that most entities have migrated to bundled JavaScript and off of CDNs.
I'd like to keep 500MB or so of data locally and just have it replace the network requests when they're made. I'd be curious how much data that might end up saving after a month or year of browsing.
I'm more interested in techniques for faster page loading.