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Comment by dngray | Hacker News Reader

> Consent-O-Matic (auto fill cookie consent forms)

This will modify the browser fringerprint making you more unique.

I would not install so many extensions as you're trusting a huge number of organizations/people with privileged access to your browser. Anything that modifies CSS, Document Object Model (DOM) will make your browser stand out.

We wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.privacyguides.org/2021/12/01/firefox-privacy-20...

That includes any extensions that modify what is requested etc. See:

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions

See https://www.privacyguides.org/desktop-browsers/#firefox, you really don't need to do anything more than that.

> Facebook Container

etc, not needed unless you login to multiple Facebook accounts.

> Disconnect

Not needed, you should enable Firefox's ETP Enhanced Tracking Protection, this includes anything on that list. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

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Trying to avoid tracking on the modern web is a losing battle for any but the most hyperparanoid, consistently careful, and technically astute individuals.

For everyone else: you're going to leak identity information one way or another, and it's going to get correlated. The more plugged-in and connected you are, the harder it is to remain anonymous.

If you really value your privacy, don't use the internet or any types of computers, including phones, and never go outside.

It's a cat and mouse game, and the cats have won.

This comment is true on the facts, but militates for what I consider to be a poor conclusion. I know a lot of people who talk this way, and it's usually those who are best positioned to defend themselves from surveillance. This is annoying to me because giving up on surveillance defense doesn't really make sense in the long term for individuals, and we need technical experts in the resistance.

Try to remember that policy, law, and major social trends tend to have slower feedback loops than other machines. It's hard to know today where we will innovate that will ultimately make a contribution to societal progress, but I can tell you with pretty high certainty that giving up won't help change anything for the better.

Like the lady said, "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable--but then, so did the divine right of kings."

> If you really value your privacy, don't use the internet or any types of computers, including phones, and never go outside.

Or, perhaps, take a bit of a more nuanced view of things. Perfect privacy, exactly like perfect security, is and always has been an unattainable ideal. But less than perfection is still very useful.

Locking your front door won't stop someone with a battering ram, but you might want to do it anyway.

I wish I'd have a plugin that makes the difference before/after accepting cookie consent, always accept, and always flush them between pages.

I know by experience that the key isn't about refusing them, but letting them having those "user accepted" KPI values, even if it goes nowhere behind.

I use uBlock Origin's element picker and element blocker features to just make the popup notices disappear, without accepting them.

But that's mostly just a habit of mine that I know is pretty useless, as websites don't need cookies to track you, and I really don't know why they even bother anymore.

Try using the extension "I don't care about cookies"

It's excellent. I have needed to disable it occasionally to make basic site functionality work on some sites that I absolutely need to use, though I'm forgetting which ones.

ICYMI: That extension was bought up by Avast.

https://www.androidpolice.com/i-dont-care-about-cookies-acqu...

Well poop!

I've used Cookie AutoDelete. It was good. Is "I don't care about cookies better"? If so, how?

> Cookie AutoDelete

Don't bother with this extension as it can't delete other storage locations where there is persistant storage. Also Firefox has TCP, Total Cookie Protection so you don't need them anyway.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/02/23/total-cookie-pr...

Better to just sanitize on close https://www.privacyguides.org/desktop-browsers/#sanitize-on-... and maybe keep history.

If you want to keep persistent logins then whitelist those specific cookies to those specific sites or use a password manager.

I'm not sure if Cookie AutoDelete hides or auto-accepts cookie popups, but that was the main motivation for using "I don't care about cookies" -- I don't want to see all these ridiculous cookie notices on every site I visit.

Personally, if I had to assign the web tracking industry to either cats or mice, I'd chose the rodents.

I use Ad Nauseum instead of plain UBlock so that the data sent is just garbage. You would think something simple like clicking all the ads wouldn't work, but it works well enough that Google banned it from the Chrome store

I totally forgot about Ad Nauseam! I used to use it instead of uBlock Origin (which, if I remember correctly, is what Ad Nauseam actually uses for its adblocking). Google banning it from their extensions marketplace only strengthened my loathing for Google and my resolve to use it. I don’t remember why I eventually stopped - probably the inconvenience. Now that I’m a Firefox user, I should pick that back up and give it a spin again. It was entertaining to see the visualization of all the ads it had clicked on.

I also used to use Chaff (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chaff/jgjhamliocfh...), which opens up a tab and browses on its own when the browser is idle and disappears when you start using it again. As with Ad Nauseam, the means of protecting privacy behind it is not anonymity, but rather obfuscation - muddifying your actual browsing behavior by flooding the data you leave behind with junk data (at which point it ceases to be data, I suppose). The problem with that extension was that I would sit back and wait for it to start browsing, and then I’d waste too much time watching it / customizing its behavior.

The book _Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest_, written by the authors who developed Ad Nauseam and TrackMeNot, has a great chapter on chaff (the obfuscation tactic, not the Chaff extension mentioned above).

> Ad Nauseam

Don't do this, you're not making your browser any more private than just blocking using uBlock Origin.

Any kind of "obfuscation" extensions that change browsing behavior significantly modify the fingerprint. There are a lot of uBO and other adblocking users but very few Ad Nauseam users or users of other weird extensions.

I also wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a way to filter out those "clicks" anyway from the ad provider's side.

They are risky and mostly written by people who think they sound cool without thinking of the side effects.

Your consistent advice in your post history is don't ever use any extensions besides uBlock Origin because of fingerprinting and "privacy"

But what if I want actually use the web instead of just blocking ads. Sponsorblock, TamperMonkey, 1Password, CamelCamelCamel, etc are all useful extensions as well that make browsing the web specifically for me better.

There are so many fingerprinting techniques that it seems pointless to have a detrimental experience generally instead of using a sandboxed computer for specific dangerous activities.

I'll continue to use Ad Nauseum, despite your recommendations against it, because I'd rather have a known worthless profile than a worthless browser.

>I also wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a way to filter out those "clicks" anyway from the ad provider's side.

Theres no evidence supporting this, but Google blocking it from the Chrome store is strong evidence that filtering out those clicks is actually difficult

Edit: Also its a moot point as extensions can't be used for fingerprinting if you just don't use Chrome https://github.com/z0ccc/extension-fingerprints#extension-fi... . I assume any activity I do in Chrome is sent back to Google (or Microsoft or Brave) regardless of plugins installed.

Still, you're asking everyone to believe your hunch over the developer's with nothing to back it up.

Maybe they banned it because Google pays webmasters for clicks on ads and that extension makes them waste money

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