Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Google said it was too hard to target ads to people (www.digitaltrends.com)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Came across this article and it got me thinking, are there any simple ways to defeat advanced tracking methods (fingerprinting, tracking pixels, etc.)?

Obviously you could go the Tor on a virtual machine route, or a non persistent set up like TAILS, but what about a browser that's able to give say, a 80% solution?

I work in the security industry and am always looking for the solution that is simple enough that its palatable to a client (not asking to change your whole lifestyle, just push this button) but also relatively effective.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

i use uMatrix (by the same author as uBlock Origin), which essentially allows very granular control over what dynamic content to allow:

per domain and subdomain you can allow script, xhr, media, frames, cookies, images, css, and other things

so you can say, for example, on lemm.ee deny any scripts from google.com from loading and deny any xhr (so analytics can’t work even if the script is hosted on the sites own domain)

this stops a lot of fingerprinting in its tracks (except when you need to allow eg reCAPTCHA), but it does break pretty much every website until you go and allow only known good things (like scripts and xhr to the sites own domain)

there’s also server-side fingerprinting, which is harder again

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This looks to be an excellent tool, thanks for sharing and have a good one.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

you’re welcome! you too!

it should be noted though that it hasn’t been updated since 2021, and its repo has been archived (i’m not sure of the reasons). it still works great, but it’s not going to get any updates

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Its functionality is pretty much built into uBlock Origin now, see https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

i’ve tried using dynamic filtering before, but honestly the UI for it is horrible… their example they give for allowing youtube embeds shows my issue with it pretty well:

their solution is either to allow everything from google.com and youtube.com, or to allow all 3rd party frames

uMatrix allows me to, for example, allow 3rd party frames only from youtube.com, and block cookies for those same frames (heck you could even allow frames and block CSS originating from google if that worked!)

this is particularly useful for analytics services… sometimes the whole page won’t load if an analytics script doesn’t load, so you can allow only scripts and block xhr so it can’t send pings back home

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah it's definitely more "logical" and easier to use the way uMatrix does it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

gimme an advanced advanced mode that mimicks the uMatrix UI and i’d donate monthly for sure - uMatrix is one of my most used tools! i’d switch to uBO if the UI were as powerful

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I wouldn't have known, it's very granular and not for the faint of heart (or technically limited.) Just what OP asked for!