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Privacy Badger is also good for things like this: you can be logged into Facebook, but Privacy Badger will block requests to Facebook from third-party sites. h
by andrewaylett 9y ago
Privacy Badger is also good for things like this: you can be logged into Facebook, but Privacy Badger will block requests to Facebook from third-party sites.
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
- civilitty 9y agoPrivacy Badger is great and goes way beyond other anti-tracking and ad blockers. They also keep an eye on a lot of the CDNs to make sure they're not running sneaky stuff like canvas finger-printing or using local storage to bypass various protections.
- Karunamon 9y agoI just wish Privacy Badger didn't force DNT to be enabled. Not only does the entire concept mean trusting the advertising companies implicitly, the header serves to differentiate your traffic.
- dmix 9y agoYou're worried about browser fingerprinting? Does any Firefox extension effectively counter that? From my understanding blocking 3rd party JS is largely insufficient for accomplishing this, regardless of DNT settings. You may be right regardless that it's better to appear as much like a stock browser as possible, in terms of privacy settings, so DNT should stay disabled. But in practical terms it might not make of a difference.
- problems 9y agoSimple blockers actually do a lot of good here - because many of the things that will fingerprint you are not first party sites but 3rd party ad scripts.
- totalperspectiv 9y agoI don't know of any tools to block fingerprinting, but here's a cool tool by the EFF for testing how unique your browser is: https://panopticlick.eff.org https://panopticlick.eff.org
- emn13 9y agoPanopticlick is a best guess, only. If you use exactly the same system twice, it should detect that. However, browsers and systems autoupdate frequently, and various other things that are fingerprinted are also not really fixed. For a single browser session; this should work. Over months, it's harder. A tracker would needs to at least be quite aggressive and collect a lot of information to track you, and then be fairly clever in fuzzily matching that in the future if they want to track you over time. Which isn't to say that short-to-medium term tracking is just fine, but it's not black and white either.
- aepc 9y agoYes, canvasblocker blocks one kind of fingerprinting. Combined with ublock (or privacybadger) + self destructing cookies and maybe decentraleyes, and a vpn, you are almost there...
- sillysaurus3 9y agoNone of these measures protect you against tracking, though. And if they don't, why use them? It's better to be honest with yourself and admit how effective tracking is nowadays. Your user agent plus unique plugin installations plus fonts installed equals a unique fingerprint across IP addresses. The above isn't an exhaustive list, either. There are dozens of tricks to track you.
- mintplant 9y agoFacebook can't track you by those metrics if a filter like Privacy Badger blocks requests to their servers.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoIs it really that effective? I admit I assumed it was hard to dodge the global advertisement apparatus, but maybe it's possible. Example: jQuery is sometimes hosted on Google CDNs. You can't block that request without breaking the site, right? But that request sends all your info.
- problems 9y agoYes, it's really that effective - blocking the facebook like button doesn't break most websites. And typically a request for something like jquery from a CDN will contain little more than your IP address and cookies. You can even prevent the cookies from being sent if you want. The only way they could get away with more than this would be to modifying the resulting script to grab more info from your machine.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoIsn't your IP address plus cookies enough to track you?
- problems 9y agoYes, but they can be trivially blocked or discarded. My main point is that no advanced fingerprinting tactics can be used so the simple means work in the case of most site-breaking things. Privacy Badger eats CDN cookies - that's actually one of its main features, so it will prevent this kind of thing quite nicely without breaking websites.
- snakeanus 9y agoYou can also do that with uMatrix as well as with uBlock Origin.
- ddalex 9y agoOr Ghostery. I run it side by side with ublock Origin. It makes the web livable.