Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

And there are indeed a few solutions that actually grant you partial relief from the pains of online tracking. First, switch your search engine, email and other major services where your personal information is heavily tracked to good private alternatives. Second, add EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere plugin to your browser, which will encrypt web site connections where possible. Third, add EFF’s Privacy Badger plugin to your browser, which blocks third-party trackers. These three simple changes will pretty seamlessly and significantly reduce your digital footprint.

Since this is a quote from the article, I feel this is an appropriate space to ask: does anyone have a page explaining how these various privacy extensions interact/overlap with each other? I tend to install (or at least try out) pretty much every popular one at some point or another, and I'm hoping to reduce redundancies. Alot of these tools show up on recommended "Get These If You're Serious About Privacy" lists without indicating what exactly each extension does or how it might interact with another extension. These include:

- Adblock Plus - Ghostery - Disconnect - HTTPS Everywhere - EFF Privacy Badger - uBlock - NoScript

At this point, I've "slimmed" down to just HTTPS Everywhere and uBlock, although I'm debating adding Privacy Badger. However, their own page mentions that it's "based on ABP code" [0], so my thought is that uBlock is probably also taking care of it.

Is that sufficient? Is there any danger in installing Privacy Badger and uBlock, for instance, if they serve the same function? Will they step on each other's toes?

Some kind of comparison chart would be useful.

[0] - https://www.eff.org/privacybadger#how_is_it_different

I have personally found that a hosts file can reduce the need for a bunch of those addons - it can block not only ads, but also many forms of tracking. I've found it very refreshing when surfing the web.

For reference, I use: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

I've thought of using hosts file vs. plugins but have never really made the switch. I'm a bit concerned that I'll run into cases like a website is broken due to a hosts file setting, and I can't easily bypass it like I can with a plugin. Do you ever run into situations like this?

I've found sites that put ads in front of video sometimes break with privacy blockers (anything from news sites to comedycentral.com). I assume there's some code that won't load the content if it can't load the ad. Fair enough -- I'm not actively targetting the ads (something needs to pay for the content), but my privacy blocker gets them sometimes.

For those sites, opening up the site in incognito mode (which is by default sandboxed from any plugins) fixes them. A hostfile blacklist would require far more work to fix the jank.

The only breakage I have ever noticed is the occasional site which has about 30 or so "broken image" placeholders surrounding the content. Otherwise, I don't even notice its presence.

µBlock can import hosts files, and it has an off-switch :)

Are there any utilities for management of the hosts file?

I've never used one aside from a text editor. Plain text file with whitespace delimited items; about as simple as it gets.

Gas Mask on OSX: http://clockwise.ee/

Does having thousands of lines in your hosts file degrade browser performance due to increased length of lookups?

The "based on ABP code" apply only For the Chromium/Chrome version

"For the Firefox version of Privacy Badger, we also eschewed the ABP engine in favor of something we wrote ourselves. Don't get me wrong, ABP is a great tool and we learned a lot from its code - but we wanted something as lean and performant as possible....."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7686396

also ublock makes ABP, Ghostery & Disconnect redundant. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-and-other...

A related question: If someone with expertise or data could compare the effectiveness of tracker-blocking solutions, such as Ghostery and Disconnect, it would be helpful.

µBlock vs Adblock Plus vs Ghostery vs Disconnect vs No blocker https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-and-other...

There is a chance that some extensions will interfere with each other. For instance, Ghostery mentions this on their options page:

Warning! When combined with other cookie monitoring addons such as Beef Taco, Cookie Monster, and Google Opt-Out, this feature can cause unresponsive script errors. If you experience this error, please try disabling this feature or conflicting addons.

That kind of problem used to happen with DOS TSRs (the equivalent of multitasking extensions or daemon processes). It's funny to think that the reason for browser extension incompatibilities is kind of analogous to the reason for TSR incompatibilities: both of them will hook function calls in the system whose functionality they're extending, and make assumptions about how they can alter, act on, or cancel the function call without breaking things, and whether or how it needs to be passed along afterwards. If only one extension is loaded, these assumptions aren't stressed very much, but when several are loaded the assumptions can conflict.

(That analogy isn't perfect because the TSRs also had an issue about patching the interrupt descriptor table, which is where the system looks up the location of an interrupt handler; one common problem was that if TSRs weren't unloaded in the same order in which they were loaded, the table could be "restored" with values that were not actually current, which I don't think is a problem that has an equivalent for browser extensions!)

Try RequestPolicy. It blocks all requests to domains other than the host's, unless you whitelist them. It comes with optional whitelists you can use for popular sites.

On one hand, it's cumbersome, requiring you to whitelist some requests and reload when you visit a new webpage (most sites require a CDN at least). On the other, it's easy to use and good security.

Additionally, try RequestPolicyContinued[0] because the original RequestPolicy dev has stopped maintaining it.

[0] http://requestpolicycontinued.github.io

Or try Policeman https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/policeman/

AFAIK the only way to do tracking is some combination of images and JS. All these 'blocking' plugins are redundant when those two seemingly elephants in the room are disabled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com