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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that is a long (if sometimes repetitive) list! Hopefully Richard had help putting that list together. I have two general comments:

1. I am surprised how many non tech Saavy people I talk with are starting to understand privacy issues.

2. I had dinner last night with some Silicon Valley residents who were talking about what a horrible investment Facebook would be long term. New things will replace Facebook, and they will eventually have fewer active users.

A bit off topic, but advice I like to give people is to use one specific web browser for social media connected sites like Facebook, GMail + Google+, Twitter, etc. and another web browser with locked down security for all other browsing. This is easy to do, lets people enjoy the social media stuff if they like, and still maintain some degree of privacy.

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Disclaimer: I work for Disconnect

https://disconnect.me/ is designed to allow people to protect themselves from being spied on across the internet by Facebook, Google, et al without the inconvenience of using a separate browser or similar methods.

Anecdotally, I've also experienced a growth in non-techie interest in online privacy - in the pre Snowden era, I would have to explain myself and justify what I do every time I was asked where I worked. Nowadays, I get asked for a download link.

I started using your service in place of ghostery. I like both of them and I truly appreciate what you guys are doing here.

The only short-coming is that my browser sometimes freezes when it is blocking certain flash objects. I consider it a minor inconvenience and a worthwhile trade-off. In general, sites load way faster. I am often appalled when I see the amount of trackers being blocked on some of these pages. It shows why the web, despite running on faster servers and delivering content across faster networks to faster computers, appears to be slowing down year after year.

It also reminds me that I have a responsibility to the users who visit my sites. I will never use any ad-tracking or social-media tracking software on my sites. I will host my own ads on my site and not depend on third-party companies to insert and regulate my ad presence. I will use minor tracking tools, but solely with the aim of improving user experience.

In all, I am very glad that you guys are doing what you are doing. In some meta respects, I think you are improving not only the state of the uses who use your product, but also the general well-being of the entire internet. Once we can extinguish the abusive trackers out there, we all can learn how to monetize our sites in a respectful and appropriate fashion.

I also don't track users at my sites except for anonymous cookies on my cooking web site. The cookie lets me identify them anonymously so I can keep track of food they have on hand for suggesting recipes.

I put a lot of work into my sites and the really large payoff is meeting people with similar interests and also people who might want to use my consulting services. It would make me sad to have to abuse people's privacy in order to make a living. (I am contracting at Google for a while, but I generally think that mostly Google falls into the good guys camp, as opposed to Facebook - just my personal opinion.)

Not hard to do in Chrome, just point to a different user-data-dir for each category of browsing you need. I have three, one for general browsing, and two others for gmail accounts. That way I can use google without being logged in to the 'general' browser; and use the other two just for gmail. This way I never have to log out or clear the cache after checking email. I can be logged into two gmail accounts at once without my web history being directly tracked.

Example:

    /usr/bin/google-chrome --user-data-dir=/home/bleh/.config/gmail http://www.gmail.com

This still makes you vulnerable to panopticlick style browser identification. Different browsers are a little better in that sense.

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