Improving your online privacy: An update
blog.ovalerio.net
blog.ovalerio.net
If you want to participate in the modern economy, than you need to assume there is never any isolation. Even creeps with phones will show up taking photos on private property, as some app paid them $5 to risk their lives trespassing.
Mozilla Firefox collects beacon telemetry with a UUID by default (as does most browsers). While there is a lot of community goodwill around the popular browser, most are not technically advanced enough to mitigate the dozens of defaults that do not respect user privacy.
Additionally, most modern OS are just a crude sales funnel for OEM products and services. Technically, tying and racketeering with a computer is still illegal, but cultural norms have shifted expectations on corporate conduct.
This is the modern web, and arguably it was a mistake =)
Agreed. Although I say it differently: the web is dead. It has been thoroughly transformed into a hostile place optimized for commerce and surveillance. As such, it is no longer really capable of doing the things that used to make it great.
I find this profoundly tragic. But also affirming that a respected source of wisdom aligns with my own "truth". So, maybe it's not too hyperbolic to say the "Web is dead" if it is dead to it's own creator.
Some of whatever it was lives on, in ideas and values of a minority. We cannot wind it back, or rebuild it on the sewer it now is. For the rest, who know no better, it is a horrible, horrible place.
What we might usefully teach children are the many other ways to use computers and the internet, as local oracles, as peer to peer technologies, through networks on other protocols.
Yep. Almost every CMP and privacy statement accidentally confirms that:
"We value your privacy!"
Yeah you value my privacy. You want to own it.
[0] - https://osmand.net/
As far as location maintenance, this is obviously correlated with usage, and so I hope this will improve over time.
I see very little progress on the other three.
> Use fake profiles / identities.
All the journos, mods, and celebs lobbying against, complaining about, and trying to eradicate anonymity/pseudonymity online are acting against your interests. I would even like to see more social norms against "namefagging."
Real names are for the most banal online activities (mostly buying stuff), for everything else there are aliases with varying levels of technical obscurity (alternative/temp email → VPN → Tor). Give them nothing, pay Mullvad the €5 privacy tax.
Removing your information from all social media / messengers : https://redact.dev (disclaimer, im on the team)
Removing your information from all databrokers https://easyoptouts.com / incogni / deleteme / optery
How ironic. In order to remove my data from the internet, I first need to give my data to that random website.
Actually, Optery is a YC 2022 company and there are some good discussions on Optery and its competitors here on HN, ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605010
For those evaluating data removal services, a solid first step is to sign up for each company’s free scan and compare the results.
Full disclosure: I am on the Optery team
I don’t think this is the case. fairly recently I’ve seen the old “if you dont want to be tracked by facebook, then dont use it!!!” take on here from people who are supposed to know better.
Maybe not explicit, but if you told them I guarantee most people do not care at all, or people would be far more upset than they currently are.
The '90s web was fine without ads, in its "pamphleteering" days when people spent an amount of money proportionate to how badly they wanted to say something, and that was it.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/18/california_passes_bil...
It specifically exempts vertically integrated data brokers such as Google and Facebook.
In other words, if a data broker sells your data, and it is used for an ad auction run by a third party, that’s subject to the opt out.
If google uses your data to place bids on behalf of an advertiser in an auction that google runs and then places the ads using its own infrastructure, there is no opt out requirement.
If the second scenario sounds like it is prone to auction fraud and abuse of monopoly power, that’s because it is. Take a look at today’s DOJ testimony from a former Google exec.
(To be clear, I want a stronger, ideally opt-in, bill that applies equally to that entire industry, not one that picks winners based on lobbying and campaign donations.)
If your phone gives Google a list of your GPS coordinates over the last 30 days that's your data and you can request that Google delete it. They don't care, because they've already used that to learn where you live, how often you go to bars, where you work, how often you go to the gym, and who you've been sleeping with. That's their data, not yours.
Data brokers don't care about deleting your data. Their data about your data is what they get paid for.
I use Vivaldi configured thus for general browsing, have Firefox for those annoying JavaScript-backed sites that fail miserably if cookies are blocked, with a one-click button to nuke all cookies just after reading the article, and Safari for e-commerce sites where I need autocompletion of shipping address and other stickiness.
I have adopted this for almost a year now. Once I learned that it is possible to bypass Windows login, I thought that if the agent could get access to my browser with all cookies in, he could easily impersonate me in every possible corner of my digital life. So, no thanks. I live in a place where you can get your laptop stolen at any moment. So in my case, the perpetrator won't get much further as he won't have my password manager's master password. Local files are all inside a VeraCrypt volume so he won't have any luck finding them in readable form.
This is the bare minimum of my threat model.
Librewolf comes with an auto-updater exe which I would just rename. You can manually update it by grabbing the latest installer exe, extracting, and manually copying the librewolf folder across.
Sandboxie has a few things to configure but are mostly self-explanatory. Looking at breakout apps and file/folder permissions will be useful if you want to still be able to save to the local harddrive outside the sandbox.
Of course, as years pass, the need for more "digital self-defense" increases at all levels. Maybe one day we'll hear of someone who had pulled it off by presenting a great value prop for this kind of service.
I think the biggest concern is to only install extensions from developers and organizations you trust.
As for your browser fingerprint, on the one hand, the more custom your browser setup, the more you stand out. On the other hand, Privacy Badger exists to reduce pervasive, non-consensual tracking. We especially aim to block pervasive fingerprinters, along with other obnoxious types of trackers.
More about Privacy Badger below, adapted from https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
While there is a lot of overlap between the various manually-edited advertising/tracker lists and Privacy Badger, unlike list-based tools, Privacy Badger automatically learns to block trackers based on their behavior. This means that Privacy Badger may learn to block trackers your list-based tool doesn’t know about.
Besides automatic learning, Privacy Badger comes with other advantages like cookie blocking, click-to-activate placeholders for potentially useful tracker widgets (video players, comments widgets, etc.), and outgoing link click tracking removal on Facebook and Google (recently updated, see https://www.eff.org/badger-link-tracking-protection-update).
Privacy Badger is also a political tool. Privacy Badger sends the Global Privacy Control signal to opt you out of data sharing and selling, and the Do Not Track signal to tell companies not to track you. If trackers ignore your wishes, Privacy Badger will learn to block them. By using Privacy Badger, you support the Electronic Frontier Foundation and help fight for a better Web for everybody.
For example, what makes Firefox, Safari, and Brave ethical browsers but Edge and Chrome not?
Firefox development has undergone plenty of unethical decisions, and I'm not sure what even a distant justification for Safari being 'ethical' would be.
Those are just a couple of examples. The OP is a list of arbitrarily selected and often not particularly valuable advice that leaves many holes. What do people see in it that they voted it to the front page?
Yet, same article strongly discourages Chrome.
And Apple iOS does not have Chromium either.
:-/
https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/user-guide/supported-b...
It is like they have an agenda.
Remember when Chrome (chromium) was a fork of Safari (webkit)?