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This gist misleads in a few ways by being so vague and seems to be more about disabling every somewhat useful feature that sounds bad for tinfoil hat enthusiast
by kirb 9y ago
This gist misleads in a few ways by being so vague and seems to be more about disabling every somewhat useful feature that sounds bad for tinfoil hat enthusiasts. Still has useful things, like disabling Pocket if you don’t want it and forcing newer TLS versions. Others are silly (disabling things that already ask for your permission, like location), dangerous (disabling Google Safe Browsing), or already exposed in the settings UI anyway (DNT, tracking protection, telemetry). To each their own, use these if you think they’re important to you, but for most people it’s fear-mongering about nothing and enabling a few things in the privacy settings page is sufficient.
- gsich 9y agoLocation is pretty useless. It is based on what address your ISP has in most cases.
- michaelmrose 9y agoYou can get an addon to set your location manually if like mmost non mobile devices there is no actual gps. I use this so that I get actually accurate results.
- Viper007Bond 9y agoOn the contrary. Maybe if you're on a hardwired desktop, but for everything else it is incredibly accurate. You don't even need to have GPS in your device -- WiFi is plenty. Try it: https://whereamirightnow.com/ https://whereamirightnow.com/ It puts my laptop exactly where I am.
- loeg 9y agoWired, it gives me a location 3 miles away from my house. Smartphone, it want to use GPS. That's kind of cheating, isn't it?
- userbinator 9y agoSmartphone, it want to use GPS. That's kind of cheating, isn't it? It is, but it also shows just how much information people could leak if they casually dismiss any permissions prompting with "allow" (or even worse, have such permissions be granted by default.)
- gsich 9y agoWhich makes the removal of the location feature (or the default off) all the more better.
- weberc2 9y agoThe OP said wifi w/o GPS. Give that a shot maybe?
- loeg 9y agoYeah, I tried that, but the mobile version of website refuses to proceed without GPS.
- oxguy3 9y agoI'm on a desktop with no wi-fi card and it's within a stone's throw, how the hell...
- craftyguy 9y ago> It puts my laptop exactly where I am. Did you allow permission for location? Because if you did, it kind of defeats the purpose of showing that disabling this permission helps obscure your location to websites.. On my desktop, it asked for permission, and when denied it threw up its hands and said that it had no idea where I was.
- Viper007Bond 9y agoYes, of course because the comment I was replying to was about location being worthless in general.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago> for most people it’s fear-mongering about nothing To be fair, a core argument in favor of Firefox is essentially fear-mongering about google and your personal data. It always struck me as odd that actions many people would call "shady" if google does it are condoned in FF because Mozilla.
- jkolem2 9y agoMozilla is not the largest advertising company on Earth whose core business is profiling people to package and sell them.
- Tloewald 9y agoNo it’s just beholden to one or another of them.
- windlep 9y agoI was under the impression the search deals are merely which engine are the default. How does having the default search be Google make the Mozilla corp beholden to Google?
- nitrogen 9y agoIf the search engine is unhappy, they will pay less money to be the default.
- tekromancr 9y agoThen another search engine will happily take the that browser's market share.
- geezerjay 9y agoWhich search engine might that be? Last time I looked, Google operated a de facto monopoly.
- lucideer 9y ago> dangerous (disabling Google Safe Browsing) Dangerous is a strong word here. Yes, this feature does make browsing the web safer, but I would stop short of inverting that statement to mean that disabling it makes the web dangerous. It primarily protects you from sites engaging in social engineering of some kind: these can admittedly be extremely sophisticated, to the point of fooling most very technical people, but generally speaking it's still mostly avoidable with some care. I would recommend most people having a safe browsing feature enabled, but I wouldn't fear-monger those disabling it either. It's also worth mentioning that Mozilla provide their own service here -- Shavar -- so one needn't use Goog