5 ms·

After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches, all I want a browser to do is lie and obfuscate. So

After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches, all I want a browser to do is lie and obfuscate. So I'll gladly take the sledgehammer boolean of resistFingerprinting for now. I've yet to come across an extension that does something like this so I'm presuming it's not possible via extensions? Are Mozilla working to make this more granular and let me whitelist individual features on a per site basis? I'd far rather lose tracking than get the very minor benefit of a (slow loading) web font or en-GB over en-US. Especially if I can opt in the few I trust or need those features.

Skunkleton 8y ago
> After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches... I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back. I remember thinking that it seemed totally insane. But in light of the reality of 2018, I am coming around. The way I see it, I can keep tweaking privacy settings in a browser, or opting out of collection, or doing any number of other things to attempt to protect my privacy, _or_ I could just stop using services that do not respect my privacy in the first place. Perhaps certain aspects of modern life have taken too much, and they need to be abandoned until they are reformed?
- pieterr 8y ago
  > I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back. One of these you mean? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869515 [2] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
  - Skunkleton 8y ago
    It was directly related to #2, but I only made it there as a result of reading some other article. It has been a while and I don't remember the source.
- Theodores 8y ago
  The irony is that everyone knows a bit too much about RMS and exactly how he behaves online or in interviews. His efforts at privacy have backfired.
  - smadge 8y ago
    RMS’s efforts are not for not privacy as some absolutist doctrine: no one must know anything about me. Instead they are about freedom: people should know about me what I let them know about me; I am in control of my data and my online presence. We know lots about RMS’s internet habits specifically because he shares them with us using free and open services.
    - beenBoutIT 8y ago
      He's put his own special RMS twist on the classic 'vagrant in the library' model of internet use, taking it a step further by shunning browsers entirely and not using cellular devices. IIRC, he does explicitly mention privacy as being one of his motivations.
- oldcynic 8y ago
  I agree. I'm coming around to some of his view, and no longer see him as quite so extreme. Still think he weakens his message with the alternative language, like "used" instead of user etc. Always have. The difficulty of course is right now it's nearly everyone at it. Too early to say if GDPR will make an appreciable difference, though it seems like it should. So that leaves few choices outside of gnu everything or layers of hacks and browser extensions. I have hope that many services will start being much more careful in what tracking and data they actually need after recent events.
- ataturk 8y ago
  I wrote my dissertation on Internet privacy back in 2003. It's sad how much of what I talked about has come true. People at the time thought I was pretty far out there, called me a "privacy Cassandra" and other not-flattering things. My whole research topic was threatened by 9/11 because after that incident, nobody cared about privacy at all. Up to that point, privacy was gaining ground as an important area of study and a lot of work was being done. Bush II and his junta put an end to all of it for almost 20 years! I can't describe to you what a gut punch 9/11 was for my research and I don't mean to sound selfish, but god damnit, we have lost so much ground because of statism and security theater while giving away our lives to this technological terror. Worse, companies like Google will happily baseline on the typical Chinese "citizen's" level of privacy, which is less than none! Google doesn't care, they would prefer to have the same policies worldwide and if that policy is baselined at the level of "people have no rights" then that is just fine with them.
Balgair 8y ago
For FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-spoofer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-... I think this one is no longer working with the newest FF versions, but check back in on it every once in a while. For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-user-agent/einpaelgookohagofgnnkcfjbkkgepnp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-user-agent/... Not as configurable as I'd like, but it gets 25% of the job done.
- oldcynic 8y ago
  I actually used to use the Firefox one. IIRC when they changed the extensions system the dev announced he couldn't support it in the new system. Time to give the chrome one a look, thanks.
chopin 8y ago
NoScript, uBlock or uMatrix offer this (largely). Fingerprinting relies heavily on Javascript. Many sites work just fine without it or with first-party JS only (fingerprinting is mostly done by third-party trackers).

Skunkleton 8y ago

> After the constant succession of revelations of the sorry state of privacy, along with myriad data breaches... I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back. I remember thinking that it seemed totally insane. But in light of the reality of 2018, I am coming around. The way I see it, I can keep tweaking privacy settings in a browser, or opting out of collection, or doing any number of other things to attempt to protect my privacy, _or_ I could just stop using services that do not respect my privacy in the first place. Perhaps certain aspects of modern life have taken too much, and they need to be abandoned until they are reformed?

pieterr 8y ago
> I remember reading an article about how Richard Stallman interacts with the internet a while back. One of these you mean? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869515 [2] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  It was directly related to #2, but I only made it there as a result of reading some other article. It has been a while and I don't remember the source.
Theodores 8y ago
The irony is that everyone knows a bit too much about RMS and exactly how he behaves online or in interviews. His efforts at privacy have backfired.
- smadge 8y ago
  RMS’s efforts are not for not privacy as some absolutist doctrine: no one must know anything about me. Instead they are about freedom: people should know about me what I let them know about me; I am in control of my data and my online presence. We know lots about RMS’s internet habits specifically because he shares them with us using free and open services.
  - beenBoutIT 8y ago
    He's put his own special RMS twist on the classic 'vagrant in the library' model of internet use, taking it a step further by shunning browsers entirely and not using cellular devices. IIRC, he does explicitly mention privacy as being one of his motivations.
oldcynic 8y ago
I agree. I'm coming around to some of his view, and no longer see him as quite so extreme. Still think he weakens his message with the alternative language, like "used" instead of user etc. Always have. The difficulty of course is right now it's nearly everyone at it. Too early to say if GDPR will make an appreciable difference, though it seems like it should. So that leaves few choices outside of gnu everything or layers of hacks and browser extensions. I have hope that many services will start being much more careful in what tracking and data they actually need after recent events.
ataturk 8y ago
I wrote my dissertation on Internet privacy back in 2003. It's sad how much of what I talked about has come true. People at the time thought I was pretty far out there, called me a "privacy Cassandra" and other not-flattering things. My whole research topic was threatened by 9/11 because after that incident, nobody cared about privacy at all. Up to that point, privacy was gaining ground as an important area of study and a lot of work was being done. Bush II and his junta put an end to all of it for almost 20 years! I can't describe to you what a gut punch 9/11 was for my research and I don't mean to sound selfish, but god damnit, we have lost so much ground because of statism and security theater while giving away our lives to this technological terror. Worse, companies like Google will happily baseline on the typical Chinese "citizen's" level of privacy, which is less than none! Google doesn't care, they would prefer to have the same policies worldwide and if that policy is baselined at the level of "people have no rights" then that is just fine with them.

Balgair 8y ago

For FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-spoofer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-... I think this one is no longer working with the newest FF versions, but check back in on it every once in a while. For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-user-agent/einpaelgookohagofgnnkcfjbkkgepnp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/random-user-agent/... Not as configurable as I'd like, but it gets 25% of the job done.

oldcynic 8y ago
I actually used to use the Firefox one. IIRC when they changed the extensions system the dev announced he couldn't support it in the new system. Time to give the chrome one a look, thanks.

chopin 8y ago

NoScript, uBlock or uMatrix offer this (largely). Fingerprinting relies heavily on Javascript. Many sites work just fine without it or with first-party JS only (fingerprinting is mostly done by third-party trackers).