> How do I stay logged into specific websites between sessions? > It’s not possible. It’s an action to combat tracking.
Turns me off immediately
Given your stated preferences, are you actually looking for a privacy-focused browser?
Some people just want to pick a different point on the tradeoff between convenience and privacy.
Imagine User A uses Fastmail every day, logging in manually every morning. User B uses Fastmail every day, with a saved login cookie. How is User B's privacy any worse? What would User B gain from not having that choice?
User B's privacy is objectively lessened by allowing tracking cookies, but that is their choice. What is out of the user's control is what mullvad chooses to spend their time supporting.
If mullvad allows users to turn off a privacy feature, now that's a permutation they have to test for. It's also an attack vector they've enabled, either through user carelessness or social engineering. Mullvad wants to be able to say "here's a browser, it's 100% private" and not have to say "as long as you do X, and don't do Y, and...". Every other browser already does that.
My understanding is that cookies etc aren't shared between containers, so I can stay logged in, and not be tracked across websites.
If it's achievable, why compromise?
This is a surprisingly effective one when combined with other users of your network. A couple of years ago, I started getting Facebook ads for things I'd never looked at, but that I knew my wife had looked at. We don't share any devices, and she doesn't even have a Facebook account.
It's pretty troubling how invasive shadow profiles are.
Choose the right tool for the job.
Being able to easily reopen a tab in a different "identity" is also a pretty neat feature.
At the end of the day, where there is attention, there will be ads. All you are fighting for should they show you relevant ads or irrelevant ads.
People who live a privileged life and have nothing else important going on in their life choose this hill to die on.
If you have that, you're a minority. And if you believe you have that, but actually you don't, you'll find out only after it's too late to save it. It's prudent instead to assume and act like you don't have it in either case.
Indeed, some of the greatest democracies have been set up precisely to that end.
For many, online privacy isn't at all about advertising. It's about working to a common good of rights and freedom for all.
Rest on your laurels all you like, but don't deride others who refuse to. It is only through the efforts of such people, and in the past those like them, that any of us have the ability to take any such rest at all.
Of course, not in the sense that the FBI, Wagner Group, or the boogy man are going after you today (but you never know what the future holds) - however data brokers and large companies have a financial incentive right now to know as much about everyone as possible and the information they collect is increasingly being used to decide your insurance rates, give you employment, etc.
>People who live a privileged life and have nothing else important going on in their life choose this hill to die on.
I mostly agree, however privacy issues impact the less privileged more, for example women seeking abortions in unfriendly states, teenagers learning about queer issues in a toxic community/family, people fleeing abusive relationships (the effort some stalkers do is truly insanity), minority groups (e.g. undocumented immigrants). Sure these groups can't dedicate lots of mental energy to privacy but plug and play browsers like this one make it easier and even if you are highly privileged protecting your privacy makes it more acceptable for others to do so too.
Edit: As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are still plenty of identifying bits.
In my case, I had to turn off that setting because without it, 1Password wouldn't work.
It seems like a harmless thing to be tracked, but once the likes of haveibeenpwned.com came out and the databases that fuel it, and services that provide search utility to those databases, it should become clear that being tracked across every single website on the internet is probably not what you want.
Scenario: You apply for a job, they look up your totally-clean email address, see the email linked to an ip address on some database from a leaky website you applied for a job on, the ip address is linked to a service where you used a certain password which you used on 6 other services, one of which had a database leak of your system fonts, now you can see all the accounts to services to which your system fonts were identically matched. Oh look, you were 13 years old when you joined stack overflow on an abandoned account and you posted some humorous, incorrect solutions that were down-voted to oblivion. But that's ok, they invite you to the job interview and they make a funny remark about your stack overflow answers and then offer you a job. Do you want to work there now that you know they completely invaded your privacy ?
And yes, performing such searches is trivial.
It's pointless to say the problem is the employer, or the hacker who released the data, or the programmer who relied on bad algorithms, or the admin who didn't secure the data. One way or another, this data will get leaked, the old hashing and encryption techniques will be broken and there will be people searching through it all. Forget about the government, at least they are beholden to law and maintaining the appearance of adhering to it. Substitute employer for neighbor, girlfriend or internet stalker and you have equally valid scenarios which are even more disturbing in my mind.