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A few simple steps to vastly increase your privacy online

290 points by kaxline 8y ago

tomglynch 8y ago
> You don't have someone following you around from store to store writing down every product you touch or look at, and then block you from entering other stores until you watch an ad. Great point. Online advertising is creepy.
- everdrive 8y ago
  > You don't have someone following you around from store to store writing down every product you touch or look at, and then block you from entering other stores until you watch an ad. Give this time, honestly. Stores are explicitly moving towards this to the extent that it's possible.
- criddell 8y ago
  In-store analytics are a pretty big thing. They are operated by companies that run the sensors and so they can track you as you go from store-to-store. They don't block you from entering though, although with some stores it's impossible to get in without seeing a giant billboard.
nrjames 8y ago
I've been using the Brave browser for the past week or so. It feels like Chrome, without the ads and spying. This article recommends Firefox. Are there good reasons to choose one over the other?
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  Using Brave for some months now, mostly satisfied. Just my personal story: Moved away from FF because of their privacy concerning unwanted plugins and marketing campaigns.
  - clarry 8y ago
    > Just my personal story: Moved away from FF because of their privacy concerning unwanted plugins and marketing campaigns. How did they violate your privacy?
- kaxline 8y ago
  I recommended Firefox mostly because it's been around longer and people have probably heard of it. For your average person, the steps in this article are already asking a lot so I wanted to keep things as familiar as possible. Even if someone doesn't use Firefox currently, they've probably heard of it, and that decreases the friction of taking actions to switch.
- gylterud 8y ago
  Brave seems more focused on their crypto currency than making a browser. And their ad-replacing shenanigans do to not exactly inspire trust[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Critical_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Critical_r...
  - dustintownsend 8y ago
    "Brave Rewards" is opt-in. Unless that changes, you don't have to participate if you don't want to. I am interested to see how it works out.
    - gylterud 8y ago
      Yeah, it is optional, but it might indicate that their priorities lie in something other than making the best privacy focused browser. Time will tell.
      - derefr 8y ago
        My understanding is that the two things go hand-in-hand. The ad-blocking is for users, while the cryptocurrency is to remove the incentive that sites have to show ads in the first place. Without the cryptocurrency component, you’d just see sites implementing anti-Brave’s-adblock features in a never-ending arms race, like we have with regular browser-extension ad-blockers today. With it, sites affected by Brave’s ad-blocking have something else they can choose to implement (a crypto paywall just for Brave users) that will give them even higher ROI than anti-adblock features would. It’s an “economic approach” to privacy.
    - CharlesW 8y ago
      > "Brave Rewards" is opt-in. For users, but not for creators. Until Brave stops taking money in creators' names without their knowledge and permission, I won't consider (and certainly would never recommend) Brave.
- fidrelity 8y ago
  Brave uses Chromium under the hood, so if you're paranoid you could assume that Chromium has some kind of backdoor integrated. Also, to my knowledge Brave Software Inc. is a For-Profit organisation. Despite those facts I am personally using Brave. In my opinion you already cut out most of the "bad stuff" of Chrome with this choice.
  - xyclos 8y ago
    If you're paranoid, you could read the source of Chromium and confirm it doesn't have a backdoor integrated.
    - redleggedfrog 8y ago
      I take your point, but it's really not practical. Any large codebase is nearly impossible to scour for this kind of thing, particularly a web browser which is an immense mound of source. There's so many ways to build in a backdoor, so many ways to build a way for you to later load a back door, that it's not plausible, even for a seasoned developer, to reliably find it. You have to stop such things with source control. The surface area of a new fix or feature is much easier to analyze for vulnerabilities, intentional or not. I do this on a daily basis, and it takes work.
      - karangoeluw 8y ago
        Yeah let's just spread conspiracies because you don't want to put in the time to prove them.
      - modzu 8y ago
        well if you don't trust chromium, as a consequence you cannot trust any apps built on electron (slack, github desktop, etc) and you can't trust a single thing on android. that's pretty steep.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - modzu 8y ago
- dustintownsend 8y ago
  I made the switch to Brave this week. I had tried it last year and ended up moving back to Chrome. But now that it is using Chromium under the hood the move from Chrome to Brave is very easy. It feels like the same browser and everything functions in the way I expect it to. I also started using Firefox recently as well. And the latest updates to it are good as well. It doesn't feel so foreign like it did in the past when I tried moving from Chrome. But, I prefer Brave for now.
- nilkn 8y ago
  Aside from what others have mentioned, Firefox also has the Tree Style Tabs extension, which is not privacy related but for me has changed the way I browse the internet.
floathub 8y ago
Install a PiHole (https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/) and redirect all port 53 (DNS) traffic to it. One of many guides: https://scotthelme.co.uk/securing-dns-across-all-of-my-devices-with-pihole-dns-over-https-1-1-1-1/ Every device on your network now fails to resolve any advertising/tracking/etc. URL. Great system, and "just works".
- feketegy 8y ago
  Except for YouTube and a bunch of other websites which are specifically targeting "pi-hole"-ed devices.
  - floathub 8y ago
    Can you provide more detail? Are you talking about pre-roll type ads in YouTube, or something else?
  - egwynn 8y ago
    I haven’t heard about this, can you provide a link with more info? I ask because I run a simple local DNS recursor with a blacklist and I haven’t run into any issues with YouTube.
    - feketegy 8y ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/9w5swx/i_think_ive_managed_to_block_youtube_ads_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/9w5swx/i_think_ive_... The problem is that YouTube sends the ads on the same IPs that the video is streaming on. The hostnames are randomly generated based on user and also location so you can't use lists from other users who successfully blocked out adverts. If you block out all IPs the video won't load, also, if you successfully block out an IP that sends advertisements, the YouTube app will hang, because it tries to load the advert. In the past it just skipped if the IP wasn't reachable, now it's requesting in an infinite loop. I reached to a point when I tried to buy a YouTube Premium, just not to see the ads, but it's not available in my country. So f Google. Currently YouTube is unwatchable to me, it's worse than traditional TVs.
khabaal 8y ago
So, the dns server of my provider against Cloudflare DNS it is. That seems to be a good idea for people in unfree countries like iran. But since my provider knows every ip i connect to, they already have everything they need in the first place, even if i dont use their dns. So handing over the dns requests to a third party seems to be a rather not so smart move to me. edit: oh, and the cloudflare dns servers are located within the 5 eyes states? nice...
- bovermyer 8y ago
  If you're ambitious, you can run your own DNS resolver and route all your traffic through that.
  - deadbunny 8y ago
    You still need to talk to upstream servers at some point.
    - bovermyer 8y ago
      True. Using DNS at all means trusting one of the root servers at some point.
    - AsyncAwait 8y ago
      Indeed, but much less frequently.
  - jstanley 8y ago
    Your ISP routes all your DNS lookups anyway, so they can see what they are even if you don't use the ISP's DNS server. They get to see every single unique name you look up, they just don't get to see how often you do it if you use a caching resolver. You'd need to VPN to somewhere else in order for your DNS queries not to be visible to your ISP.
    - khabaal 8y ago
      This is not correct anymore since dns over tls. Well most routers do not support this yet, but its possible within your distro.
janlaureys 8y ago
Switched back to Firefox since the Quantum release and I'm very happy with it. On mobile I still use Chrome, but I'm gonna check out how FF works on mobile :).
- kaxline 8y ago
  Mobile isn't so bad! No complaints so far after about a month.
- walrus01 8y ago
  One of the great things about ff on mobile is ability to use desktop extensions, like ublock origin.
- jak92 8y ago
  Firefox mobile on android is a vastly better experience. The number one reason is you can run adblock which turns many mobile sites from ad-filled disasters to readable sites.
- woodrowbarlow 8y ago
  i use "firefox focus" on mobile. i like it because using it is like using a kiosk -- after you're done, it deletes everything and starts fresh. also it's choc-full of content blockers. it's good for privacy and, more importantly for me, it encourages me to just use my phone for looking up information rather than casual time-wasting browsing. it also doesn't support multiple tabs, though (at least on iOS, i don't know about android). i've gotten used to it, and it helps to enforce my phone-as-a-tool mentality, but i can see how that could be a deal-breaker for most people.
- lordgrenville 8y ago
  I use Firefox Focus on mobile for most browsing, and regular FF for sites that I need to be logged in to. Very happy with both. Focus in particular is astonishingly fast.
- swsieber 8y ago
  If your fine with no tabs, and privacy is your top priority, on mobile I'd highly recommend "Privacy Browser" (android) - disclaimer: I know the author. It's pretty cool. It has a well thought interface for toggling settings (javascript, 1st party cookies, 3rd party cookies, block lists, etc.) and comes with pretty aggressive defaults. IIRC, the author has plans to add tab support, I'm not sure when though. Edit: Personally, at this point I'm using Firefox + uBlock origin. I've tried chrome too, but prefer Firefox. As soon as it gets tab support though, I'll be switching to privacy browser.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
brookhaven_dude 8y ago
Use Apple devices and software as much as possible?
- bovermyer 8y ago
  Apple's walled garden is not one I want to play in. I will not trade one corporate master for another.
  - neuronic 8y ago
    You are conflating two completely independent points due to personal preferences, which of course are very valid. The point still stands - with the current and known track record, Apple devices are likely more trustworthy than Google, Microsoft or <insert Asian manufacturer here>.
    - bovermyer 8y ago
      Ignoring my personal preferences and acknowledging that Apple is the most privacy-conscious for-profit corporation in the arena: _Apple is still a for-profit corporation._
      - neuronic 8y ago
        Exactly, but purely in terms of privacy it seems to be the best bet unless you would like to manufacture your own smartphone. Apple's profit, to date, relies less on user data than any of the other companies.
        bovermyer 8y ago
        You're assuming I need a smartphone.
        lostlogin 8y ago
        I think the comment applies to other off-the-shelf hardware too. What do you use?
bo1024 8y ago
This is very solid advice (although I'm not familiar with all those browser extensions and can't endorse them). To go a step farther, I make two suggestions: (1) using the uMatrix extension and disabling javascript by default. This completely blocks fingerprinting. If a site doesn't work, you can always re-enable JS in two clicks. (2) Use a VPN or Tor Browser to better hide your site browsing behavior from your ISP. Not completely related, but (3) Be very careful what software you install on your computer, tablet, and phone (especially apps).
floatingatoll 8y ago
There’s a reason these “how to privacy your browser” changes are all are not bundled with browsers — because the capability to maintain them as they are today is a one in a thousand skill or less. Maintaining this collection of changes is a significant burden that requires an ongoing investment and a willingness to deal with the technical fallout of these choices every day. So: Please don’t apply these steps to non-technical people’s browsers. They will result in an endless litany of broken banking websites, annoying support calls, memory issues, and in general a terrible user experience for others. Guides like these are why my most common technical support first response for experts having browser issues is to have them reset their browser settings and remove all addons and try again. Non-experts rarely require that, unless they tell me that an expert “made it better” for them. Don’t be that expert.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  I installed just privacy browser and HTTPS everywhere on my wife's computer and that alone was enough to break things to the point she asked me to turn them off.
- scrooched_moose 8y ago
  Agreed. I have a subset of these installed and it forces me to switch to an unblocked Chrome multiple times per day. It does force me to evaluate whether I really need access to something, but it's a hurdle.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > Please don’t apply these steps to non-technical people’s browsers. There's a fair amount of stuff in the article. You are right that it would be hard to manage if someone implemented all of the recommendations. But there's some solid advice in there. An ad-blocker like ublock-origin is a must-have ESPECIALLY for so-called nontechnical folks. I make sure to put that on the browsers of my extended family whenever I visit and inevitably get asked to "clean" computers. Does it help prevent malware? Hard to say but I think yes.
  - floatingatoll 8y ago
iagooar 8y ago
How safe is using Cloudflare from a EU perspective? Is it a big improvement, if some day the American government might just request it to hand over all the logs?
ggm 8y ago
De-install all your X509 trust anchors and only re-install the ones you understand.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
renholder 8y ago
>The company Cloudflare has a publicly accessible DNS at the address 1.1.1.1 that they claim is encrypted and secure. For it to be "encrypted and secure", the client would have to be configured to use DNSSEC, yeah? As far as I'm aware, most clients don't come with DNSSEC enabled (in OOBE configurations), so isn't this a bit misleading?
- xfitm3 8y ago
  I don’t think so. Instead you would want DoH (dns over https). DNSSEC is designed to protect against MiTM and is not really effective at anything else.
  - renholder 8y ago
    Fair enough. Cloudflar's promotional site for 1.1.1.1 seems to tout DNSSEC pretty heavily and only mentions DoH once, I believe. Still, clients still need to be configured for DoH, yeah?
    - xfitm3 8y ago
      Correct - third party software is needed (as far as I know) for DoH.
    - acdha 8y ago
      You do need client support but these days that’s not uncommon: Android Pie, Chrome, Firefox, and curl all have built-in support and there are apps for iOS and Android, and once you’ve enabled it it will work almost everywhere. I believe most clients default to dual resolution so it won’t break if you’re on a network which interferes (e.g. a ton of Cisco captive portals used that address in error) unless you’ve enabled hard-fail mode.
- tptacek 8y ago
  DNSSEC doesn't encrypt DNS traffic at all. "Encrypted and secure" DNS presumably refers to DoH, which doesn't rely on DNSSEC.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pqs 8y ago
I tried to switch to Firefox several times, and each time I go back to Chrome because I use Google Sheets and it doesn't work offline on Firefox, which is a must for me. :'( I guess I should quit Sheets, but my spreadsheet cannot be easily converted to Excel or LibreOffice.
- gardnr 8y ago
  I run both. They allow me to mentally partition things on desktop. On Android, FF is my default and I open Chrome when I need to. Firefox on Android supports uMatrix / uBlock.
- timbit42 8y ago
  Google allows their products to be incompatible with Firefox to promote Chrome. Google is anti-competitive and must be broken up and regulated.
chillingeffect 8y ago
Also recommend facebook container for firefox, for those using facebook. i've been using it for a long time and it hasn't intefered with my browsing.
ekianjo 8y ago
Cough, cough... > A non-profit giving away free software makes sense. Some of the biggest companies in the world giving away free software is suspicious. followed by... > Fortunately, you can tell your computer which DNS to use. The company Cloudflare has a publicly accessible DNS at the address 1.1.1.1 that they claim is encrypted and secure. So wait, you suddenly forgot the axiom you used just a few paragraphs back? Clouldflare is a for profit company and they give something for free but hey, this time it's not suspicious? Strange standards you live by...
- nilkn 8y ago
  I don't think the author forgot the axiom; they seem to acknowledge that they just don't know of anything better in that case: > That's about the best you can ask for with a centralized infrastructure for the internet. A recurring theme in this quest for data ownership and privacy is that you can only take it so far before you have to ultimately trust a company or entity to do what they say they're doing.
  - rsync 8y ago
    "they seem to acknowledge that they just don't know of anything better in that case" They don't know you can run your own DNS server ? It's technically trivial (for this audience) and it's basically free (very low traffic and resource instance or droplet or VM ...).
    - nilkn 8y ago
      I disagree that it's technically trivial for the audience this article is written for. The suggestions on the page are all as simple as using a particular browser, search engine, or browser plugin.
    - DoctorOetker 8y ago
      how much daily traffic does running your own DNS server generate? (to keep up to date with the domain-IP binding?) I am really interested in trying this...
jancsika 8y ago
What's the current state of the art (i.e., lowest setup time and least maintenance) for downloading the entirety of Wikipedia and browsing it locally?
j7k6 8y ago
Whenever I come across one of those articles promoting "use Firefox instead of Chrome" I wonder if I'm the only one having those huge performance issues with Firefox on macOS. I seriously tried to make the switch from Chrome to Firefox a few times in the recent years because of all the dark patterns Google is pushing upon its userbase with Chrome, version after version. But Firefox feels significantly slower, makes the MBP fans go crazy and drains the battery like hell. I've come to the conclusion that at this point it's no option for me to make the final switch to Firefox, as much as I'd like to. But I try to cut off Google's prying eyes from my browsing behaviour as much as possible: - uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger is all you need to block the most nasty privacy invaders, seriously. - I don't use the sync feature. - I don't use Gmail, so there's no reason to login to my Google account, ever. - I used Youtube's thumbs-up button as sort of bookmarks for my favorite videos, now I have a bookmarks folder for Youtube videos, which is ok for me, but might not be for everybody. - automatically clear browsing data after quitting Chrome. My dream browser would be Firefox with Chromium under the hood, but that's not very likely to happen...
- vehemenz 8y ago
  You're not the only one. Firefox uses way too much GPU power on MBPs. Supposedly fixes are in the works, but I doubt they will happen any time soon. I've learned to tune out the 'improvements to performance' claimed by Firefox releases because never actually do anything for MBP users. Like you, it is one of the main things keeping me to Chrome (although pinch-to-zoom and casting are nice, too). My solution for Chrome's privacy issues are similar to yours, except I use the full sync for bookmarks, but then I switch to a private window for actually using any Google site (except for search). At the end of the day, it's still a huge compromise. I might try going full Chromium for a while and trying your bookmarks method, although plugins are a bit of a PITA.
  - j7k6 8y ago
    The only reason I'm not using Chromium is that 1Password is not trusting it as a "secure browser".
    - 8y ago
ibm5100 8y ago
I always assumed Mozilla has too much of a little brother relationship with Google to trust that they are truly independent. I use Brave and it's good enough for my browser expectations.
OrgNet 8y ago
How does switching to a third party DNS increase privacy? might as well use your ISP's server since they already know what sites that you visit (unless you use a VPN and this article doesn't talk about that)
alkonaut 8y ago
The canvas and referrer plugins are new to me. This is great. I always wondered why canvas is enabled by default. The ratio of useful to tracking uses has to be 1:10.
lucb1e 8y ago
My only remark is that changing dns to an external server is detrimental to privacy, speed, and arguably security. I'll focus on privacy because that's the article's focus. The power of tracking comes from a central organisation being able to follow almost everyone. Having a birthday calendar on your toilet that your friends can also look at is not creepy, but a worldwide central birthday database might be creepy depending on how private you consider the information. Similarly, changing all our DNSes to 1.1.1.1 is giving Cloudflare, the NSA, and anyone who hacked Cloudflare or any intermediate router (such as your ISP's internal routers and backbone Internet routers), the ability to track our dns requests. If you leave it set to the default, probably your ISP, then someone would have to hack all ISPs on the planet to track all of it. Furthermore, if you're not paying for it... I'm paying my ISP, but not Cloudflare. Unlike XS4ALL, the ISP I have a contract with, I have no legal guarantees regarding what happens to the data from Cloudflare.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  In the United States, there are probably three or four ISPs that together serve a majority of the population. So there's not much difference there.
  - SamuelAdams 8y ago
    Exactly. And most consumers do not have a choice what ISP to use. So their options are either a) Use comcast's DNS [comcast has had a history of doing questionable things] or b) use another DNS like cloudflare that claims to be safe / secure / morale. Short of running your own DNS server, there's not exactly a lot of options.
- godshatter 8y ago
  On the other hand, Cloudflare doesn't know me from Adam but my ISP has my billing information. It basically depends on your threat model. I'm pretty sure I'm way down the ladder for the NSA, but maybe I don't want an employee at my local ISP getting in a tizzy about me because I frequent sites they don't like. And who knows in today's world what websites might outrage them? I live in a small town. This might actually be a thing I need to worry about. This discussion is prompting me to look into dnscrypt as a short-term solution.
superkuh 8y ago
The most important and easiest step is installing NoScript and going temporary whitelist only.
kgwxd 8y ago
"Be sure to turn off uBlock Origin and Smart Referer for sites that you value" No. Anyone that cares are privacy should have a strict no-whitelisting policy. Find a way to advertise without third-part scripts, find some other way to make money, stop trying to monetize all together, or just stop existing.
- npsimons 8y ago
  > find some other way to make money In this day and age of things like Patreon, there's really no excuse. I've taken the initiative and pay for Youtube Premium, on top of which I pay through Patreon to channels I view a lot. I also pay for ad-free music streaming.
- LocalPCGuy 8y ago
  I believe this is a personal choice to potentially give up privacy for sites a person values and/or trusts. It's fine for you to believe that no site should make money via advertising, but others can have a different view and act on that opinion.
captn3m0 8y ago
This misses out on the fact that ISPs regularly employ Transparent DNS Proxies and your DNS requests may never actually reach CloudFlare. Using something like DoH or DNSCrypt is the only real solution for now till OS support for DoH or DoTLS rolls out.
BadassFractal 8y ago
Never heard of Startpage before. How trustworthy is it compared to DDG?
- timbit42 8y ago
  At least they're not Google. So even if they are collecting data about what you're searching for, they have less data to link it to and probably less power to use it than Google does.
doctorRetro 8y ago
The argument for switching to Firefox seems weak. I don't doubt there are very solid reasons to do so, however the author's argument comes down to "I, personally, just trust this one more, and I'm lazy and don't want to worry about it." Okay.... that's nice.
- timbit42 8y ago
  Chrome tracks you even if you're not logged into your Google account. Another good reason to support and use Firefox is that we don't want to end up with only one browser engine, giving Google complete control over the future of the web and the rest of the internet.
  - doctorRetro 8y ago
    See, that's a perfectly valid and logical reason right there. Unfortunately, the author didn't go into that and just left it at personal preference.
tareqak 8y ago
Here is a quote from the Smart Referer section: It's kind of a dick move to the sites you like since it removes valuable analytics for them, so you can (and should) whitelist domains that you want to keep sharing data with. Why removing that information a "dick move"? When I visit a bank, restaurant, or grocery store, those places don't know where I came from before entering the store unless I have merchandise from other places. The most they can gather is that what clothing I'm currently wearing and if they keep tabs on my previous visits.
- kaxline 8y ago
  I'm thinking more of media sites that rely on ad dollars to pay the bills. Unless they have a direct subscription option or other way to pay for the service, you're eating into their bottom line. The real world analog would be newspapers and the ads they run.
  - tareqak 8y ago
    Even then, newspapers either run ads without needing to know who their customers are, or solicit this information from their customers voluntarily. People like my parents don't know that a referer is involved unless it is explicitly pointed out to them.
pard68 8y ago
> DNS > Cloudflare How about dnscrypt? The DNS servers offered through dnscrypt are much more trustworthy IMHO. Also it is trivial to setup n DNS servers and to randomly select a different server on each request, removing a bulk of that centralized nature of DNS.
parliament32 8y ago
The guide was fine until "Switch DNS to 1.1.1.1". The real solution is to use your own DNS resolver (I've been running Bind on my laptop for years with no issues). If that's not an option, it's still far better to keep using your ISP's resolvers -- yes, your ISP may be evil, but at least you're their customer. When a separate for-profit company provides a "free" service, how can the product be anything but your personal data?
auslander 8y ago
For DNS, Quad9 is a better choice than Cloudflare, as it is a not-for-profit public-benefit organization, CF is for profit company
- Tecuane 8y ago
  I believe that at one stage the Quad9 resolvers were owned by IBM. A brief look at the site indicates it was transferred to CleanerDNS, which is a 501(c)(3). Do you know how much involvement IBM still has in the project, if any?
0xCMP 8y ago
If you're going to install uBlock Origin then I recommend looking at uMatrix (same author) which does all the same thing but gives you much, much more control. It can be annoying and force a lot of refreshes, but it blocks a lot more things more consistently than anything else.
3xblah 8y ago
"Firefox is developed by a non-profit company, Mozilla, explicitly dedicated to users' needs. Google and Microsoft make money off of users in different ways and we can never be sure that their business decisions are going to align with what we would want as users." This gives short shrift to what is a complex set of interdependencies. All these browsers rely on the existence of web advertising, including Firefox. Are web ads among "users' needs"? Who decides what comprise users' needs? Users? The reality is that whatever Mozilla defines as "users' needs" will also, at least in part, represent the needs of the company authoring the competing web browser. That is because the Firefox authors are paid indirectly from the coffers of their competitor. Mozilla Foundation cannot take a stand against web advertising because its competitors rely on web advertising to make money. And Mozilla Foundation in turn relies on money from its competitors to pay its employees. Mozilla is aligned to some extent with the business decisions of its competitor. Ideally employees of Mozilla Foundation would be volunteers and Mozilla Foundation would pay them solely from donations from users. This is not what happens. Mozilla Corporation (for-profit) can, e.g., sell access to Firefox users' searches to Mozilla's competitors. e.g., Google. The profits might then be used to pay Mozilla Foundation employees. Some of those employees might leave and go to work for Google to start a competing browser. Firefox may be the lesser of multiple evils, but let's be honest it is not solely dedicated to users' needs. It has its own needs -- paying 100's of employees -- and, given the current arrangement, it must to some extent serve the needs of its competitor in order to meet them. If for example there was a user who did not wish to support the web ads business then Mozilla's decisions could never align 100% with what that user would want because she does not want to support the web ads business. Mozilla is paying employees by doing business with a competitor that gathers user data and sells access to users to advertisers. I am not downplaying the value of Mozilla. I am only pointing out that they are probably not 100% aligned with all users. They are also partially aligned with their competitor who is selling ads in order to make money.
- kaxline 8y ago
  Great points, thanks for posting. I'll try to incorporate this nuance in future posts.
known 8y ago
https://www.opennic.org/ https://www.opennic.org/ DNS servers are better than 1.1.1.1
kaxline 8y ago
There were a lot of questions about VPNs in response to this post, so I addressed them here: https://thetoolsweneed.com/one-sorta-simple-way-to-vastly-improve-your-privacy-online/ https://thetoolsweneed.com/one-sorta-simple-way-to-vastly-im...

290 points by kaxline 8y ago

> You don't have someone following you around from store to store writing down every product you touch or look at, and then block you from entering other stores until you watch an ad. Great point. Online advertising is creepy.

everdrive 8y ago
> You don't have someone following you around from store to store writing down every product you touch or look at, and then block you from entering other stores until you watch an ad. Give this time, honestly. Stores are explicitly moving towards this to the extent that it's possible.
criddell 8y ago
In-store analytics are a pretty big thing. They are operated by companies that run the sensors and so they can track you as you go from store-to-store. They don't block you from entering though, although with some stores it's impossible to get in without seeing a giant billboard.

nrjames 8y ago

I've been using the Brave browser for the past week or so. It feels like Chrome, without the ads and spying. This article recommends Firefox. Are there good reasons to choose one over the other?

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
Using Brave for some months now, mostly satisfied. Just my personal story: Moved away from FF because of their privacy concerning unwanted plugins and marketing campaigns.
- clarry 8y ago
  > Just my personal story: Moved away from FF because of their privacy concerning unwanted plugins and marketing campaigns. How did they violate your privacy?
kaxline 8y ago
I recommended Firefox mostly because it's been around longer and people have probably heard of it. For your average person, the steps in this article are already asking a lot so I wanted to keep things as familiar as possible. Even if someone doesn't use Firefox currently, they've probably heard of it, and that decreases the friction of taking actions to switch.
gylterud 8y ago
Brave seems more focused on their crypto currency than making a browser. And their ad-replacing shenanigans do to not exactly inspire trust[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Critical_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Critical_r...
- dustintownsend 8y ago
  "Brave Rewards" is opt-in. Unless that changes, you don't have to participate if you don't want to. I am interested to see how it works out.
  - gylterud 8y ago
    Yeah, it is optional, but it might indicate that their priorities lie in something other than making the best privacy focused browser. Time will tell.
    - derefr 8y ago
      My understanding is that the two things go hand-in-hand. The ad-blocking is for users, while the cryptocurrency is to remove the incentive that sites have to show ads in the first place. Without the cryptocurrency component, you’d just see sites implementing anti-Brave’s-adblock features in a never-ending arms race, like we have with regular browser-extension ad-blockers today. With it, sites affected by Brave’s ad-blocking have something else they can choose to implement (a crypto paywall just for Brave users) that will give them even higher ROI than anti-adblock features would. It’s an “economic approach” to privacy.
  - CharlesW 8y ago
    > "Brave Rewards" is opt-in. For users, but not for creators. Until Brave stops taking money in creators' names without their knowledge and permission, I won't consider (and certainly would never recommend) Brave.
fidrelity 8y ago
Brave uses Chromium under the hood, so if you're paranoid you could assume that Chromium has some kind of backdoor integrated. Also, to my knowledge Brave Software Inc. is a For-Profit organisation. Despite those facts I am personally using Brave. In my opinion you already cut out most of the "bad stuff" of Chrome with this choice.
- xyclos 8y ago
  If you're paranoid, you could read the source of Chromium and confirm it doesn't have a backdoor integrated.
  - redleggedfrog 8y ago
    I take your point, but it's really not practical. Any large codebase is nearly impossible to scour for this kind of thing, particularly a web browser which is an immense mound of source. There's so many ways to build in a backdoor, so many ways to build a way for you to later load a back door, that it's not plausible, even for a seasoned developer, to reliably find it. You have to stop such things with source control. The surface area of a new fix or feature is much easier to analyze for vulnerabilities, intentional or not. I do this on a daily basis, and it takes work.
    - karangoeluw 8y ago
      Yeah let's just spread conspiracies because you don't want to put in the time to prove them.
    - modzu 8y ago
      well if you don't trust chromium, as a consequence you cannot trust any apps built on electron (slack, github desktop, etc) and you can't trust a single thing on android. that's pretty steep.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- modzu 8y ago
dustintownsend 8y ago
I made the switch to Brave this week. I had tried it last year and ended up moving back to Chrome. But now that it is using Chromium under the hood the move from Chrome to Brave is very easy. It feels like the same browser and everything functions in the way I expect it to. I also started using Firefox recently as well. And the latest updates to it are good as well. It doesn't feel so foreign like it did in the past when I tried moving from Chrome. But, I prefer Brave for now.
nilkn 8y ago
Aside from what others have mentioned, Firefox also has the Tree Style Tabs extension, which is not privacy related but for me has changed the way I browse the internet.

floathub 8y ago

Install a PiHole (https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/) and redirect all port 53 (DNS) traffic to it. One of many guides: https://scotthelme.co.uk/securing-dns-across-all-of-my-devices-with-pihole-dns-over-https-1-1-1-1/ Every device on your network now fails to resolve any advertising/tracking/etc. URL. Great system, and "just works".

feketegy 8y ago
Except for YouTube and a bunch of other websites which are specifically targeting "pi-hole"-ed devices.
- floathub 8y ago
  Can you provide more detail? Are you talking about pre-roll type ads in YouTube, or something else?
- egwynn 8y ago
  I haven’t heard about this, can you provide a link with more info? I ask because I run a simple local DNS recursor with a blacklist and I haven’t run into any issues with YouTube.
  - feketegy 8y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/9w5swx/i_think_ive_managed_to_block_youtube_ads_with/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/9w5swx/i_think_ive_... The problem is that YouTube sends the ads on the same IPs that the video is streaming on. The hostnames are randomly generated based on user and also location so you can't use lists from other users who successfully blocked out adverts. If you block out all IPs the video won't load, also, if you successfully block out an IP that sends advertisements, the YouTube app will hang, because it tries to load the advert. In the past it just skipped if the IP wasn't reachable, now it's requesting in an infinite loop. I reached to a point when I tried to buy a YouTube Premium, just not to see the ads, but it's not available in my country. So f Google. Currently YouTube is unwatchable to me, it's worse than traditional TVs.

khabaal 8y ago

So, the dns server of my provider against Cloudflare DNS it is. That seems to be a good idea for people in unfree countries like iran. But since my provider knows every ip i connect to, they already have everything they need in the first place, even if i dont use their dns. So handing over the dns requests to a third party seems to be a rather not so smart move to me. edit: oh, and the cloudflare dns servers are located within the 5 eyes states? nice...

bovermyer 8y ago
If you're ambitious, you can run your own DNS resolver and route all your traffic through that.
- deadbunny 8y ago
  You still need to talk to upstream servers at some point.
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    True. Using DNS at all means trusting one of the root servers at some point.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    Indeed, but much less frequently.
- jstanley 8y ago
  Your ISP routes all your DNS lookups anyway, so they can see what they are even if you don't use the ISP's DNS server. They get to see every single unique name you look up, they just don't get to see how often you do it if you use a caching resolver. You'd need to VPN to somewhere else in order for your DNS queries not to be visible to your ISP.
  - khabaal 8y ago
    This is not correct anymore since dns over tls. Well most routers do not support this yet, but its possible within your distro.

janlaureys 8y ago

Switched back to Firefox since the Quantum release and I'm very happy with it. On mobile I still use Chrome, but I'm gonna check out how FF works on mobile :).

kaxline 8y ago
Mobile isn't so bad! No complaints so far after about a month.
walrus01 8y ago
One of the great things about ff on mobile is ability to use desktop extensions, like ublock origin.
jak92 8y ago
Firefox mobile on android is a vastly better experience. The number one reason is you can run adblock which turns many mobile sites from ad-filled disasters to readable sites.
woodrowbarlow 8y ago
i use "firefox focus" on mobile. i like it because using it is like using a kiosk -- after you're done, it deletes everything and starts fresh. also it's choc-full of content blockers. it's good for privacy and, more importantly for me, it encourages me to just use my phone for looking up information rather than casual time-wasting browsing. it also doesn't support multiple tabs, though (at least on iOS, i don't know about android). i've gotten used to it, and it helps to enforce my phone-as-a-tool mentality, but i can see how that could be a deal-breaker for most people.
lordgrenville 8y ago
I use Firefox Focus on mobile for most browsing, and regular FF for sites that I need to be logged in to. Very happy with both. Focus in particular is astonishingly fast.
swsieber 8y ago
If your fine with no tabs, and privacy is your top priority, on mobile I'd highly recommend "Privacy Browser" (android) - disclaimer: I know the author. It's pretty cool. It has a well thought interface for toggling settings (javascript, 1st party cookies, 3rd party cookies, block lists, etc.) and comes with pretty aggressive defaults. IIRC, the author has plans to add tab support, I'm not sure when though. Edit: Personally, at this point I'm using Firefox + uBlock origin. I've tried chrome too, but prefer Firefox. As soon as it gets tab support though, I'll be switching to privacy browser.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

brookhaven_dude 8y ago

Use Apple devices and software as much as possible?

bovermyer 8y ago
Apple's walled garden is not one I want to play in. I will not trade one corporate master for another.
- neuronic 8y ago
  You are conflating two completely independent points due to personal preferences, which of course are very valid. The point still stands - with the current and known track record, Apple devices are likely more trustworthy than Google, Microsoft or <insert Asian manufacturer here>.
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    Ignoring my personal preferences and acknowledging that Apple is the most privacy-conscious for-profit corporation in the arena: _Apple is still a for-profit corporation._
    - neuronic 8y ago
      Exactly, but purely in terms of privacy it seems to be the best bet unless you would like to manufacture your own smartphone. Apple's profit, to date, relies less on user data than any of the other companies.
      - bovermyer 8y ago
        You're assuming I need a smartphone.
        lostlogin 8y ago
        I think the comment applies to other off-the-shelf hardware too. What do you use?

bo1024 8y ago

This is very solid advice (although I'm not familiar with all those browser extensions and can't endorse them). To go a step farther, I make two suggestions: (1) using the uMatrix extension and disabling javascript by default. This completely blocks fingerprinting. If a site doesn't work, you can always re-enable JS in two clicks. (2) Use a VPN or Tor Browser to better hide your site browsing behavior from your ISP. Not completely related, but (3) Be very careful what software you install on your computer, tablet, and phone (especially apps).

floatingatoll 8y ago

There’s a reason these “how to privacy your browser” changes are all are not bundled with browsers — because the capability to maintain them as they are today is a one in a thousand skill or less. Maintaining this collection of changes is a significant burden that requires an ongoing investment and a willingness to deal with the technical fallout of these choices every day. So: Please don’t apply these steps to non-technical people’s browsers. They will result in an endless litany of broken banking websites, annoying support calls, memory issues, and in general a terrible user experience for others. Guides like these are why my most common technical support first response for experts having browser issues is to have them reset their browser settings and remove all addons and try again. Non-experts rarely require that, unless they tell me that an expert “made it better” for them. Don’t be that expert.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
I installed just privacy browser and HTTPS everywhere on my wife's computer and that alone was enough to break things to the point she asked me to turn them off.
scrooched_moose 8y ago
Agreed. I have a subset of these installed and it forces me to switch to an unblocked Chrome multiple times per day. It does force me to evaluate whether I really need access to something, but it's a hurdle.
crispyambulance 8y ago
> Please don’t apply these steps to non-technical people’s browsers. There's a fair amount of stuff in the article. You are right that it would be hard to manage if someone implemented all of the recommendations. But there's some solid advice in there. An ad-blocker like ublock-origin is a must-have ESPECIALLY for so-called nontechnical folks. I make sure to put that on the browsers of my extended family whenever I visit and inevitably get asked to "clean" computers. Does it help prevent malware? Hard to say but I think yes.
- floatingatoll 8y ago

iagooar 8y ago

How safe is using Cloudflare from a EU perspective? Is it a big improvement, if some day the American government might just request it to hand over all the logs?

ggm 8y ago

De-install all your X509 trust anchors and only re-install the ones you understand.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

renholder 8y ago

>The company Cloudflare has a publicly accessible DNS at the address 1.1.1.1 that they claim is encrypted and secure. For it to be "encrypted and secure", the client would have to be configured to use DNSSEC, yeah? As far as I'm aware, most clients don't come with DNSSEC enabled (in OOBE configurations), so isn't this a bit misleading?

xfitm3 8y ago
I don’t think so. Instead you would want DoH (dns over https). DNSSEC is designed to protect against MiTM and is not really effective at anything else.
- renholder 8y ago
  Fair enough. Cloudflar's promotional site for 1.1.1.1 seems to tout DNSSEC pretty heavily and only mentions DoH once, I believe. Still, clients still need to be configured for DoH, yeah?
  - xfitm3 8y ago
    Correct - third party software is needed (as far as I know) for DoH.
  - acdha 8y ago
    You do need client support but these days that’s not uncommon: Android Pie, Chrome, Firefox, and curl all have built-in support and there are apps for iOS and Android, and once you’ve enabled it it will work almost everywhere. I believe most clients default to dual resolution so it won’t break if you’re on a network which interferes (e.g. a ton of Cisco captive portals used that address in error) unless you’ve enabled hard-fail mode.
tptacek 8y ago
DNSSEC doesn't encrypt DNS traffic at all. "Encrypted and secure" DNS presumably refers to DoH, which doesn't rely on DNSSEC.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pqs 8y ago

I tried to switch to Firefox several times, and each time I go back to Chrome because I use Google Sheets and it doesn't work offline on Firefox, which is a must for me. :'( I guess I should quit Sheets, but my spreadsheet cannot be easily converted to Excel or LibreOffice.

gardnr 8y ago
I run both. They allow me to mentally partition things on desktop. On Android, FF is my default and I open Chrome when I need to. Firefox on Android supports uMatrix / uBlock.
timbit42 8y ago
Google allows their products to be incompatible with Firefox to promote Chrome. Google is anti-competitive and must be broken up and regulated.

chillingeffect 8y ago

Also recommend facebook container for firefox, for those using facebook. i've been using it for a long time and it hasn't intefered with my browsing.

ekianjo 8y ago

Cough, cough... > A non-profit giving away free software makes sense. Some of the biggest companies in the world giving away free software is suspicious. followed by... > Fortunately, you can tell your computer which DNS to use. The company Cloudflare has a publicly accessible DNS at the address 1.1.1.1 that they claim is encrypted and secure. So wait, you suddenly forgot the axiom you used just a few paragraphs back? Clouldflare is a for profit company and they give something for free but hey, this time it's not suspicious? Strange standards you live by...

nilkn 8y ago
I don't think the author forgot the axiom; they seem to acknowledge that they just don't know of anything better in that case: > That's about the best you can ask for with a centralized infrastructure for the internet. A recurring theme in this quest for data ownership and privacy is that you can only take it so far before you have to ultimately trust a company or entity to do what they say they're doing.
- rsync 8y ago
  "they seem to acknowledge that they just don't know of anything better in that case" They don't know you can run your own DNS server ? It's technically trivial (for this audience) and it's basically free (very low traffic and resource instance or droplet or VM ...).
  - nilkn 8y ago
    I disagree that it's technically trivial for the audience this article is written for. The suggestions on the page are all as simple as using a particular browser, search engine, or browser plugin.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    how much daily traffic does running your own DNS server generate? (to keep up to date with the domain-IP binding?) I am really interested in trying this...

jancsika 8y ago

What's the current state of the art (i.e., lowest setup time and least maintenance) for downloading the entirety of Wikipedia and browsing it locally?

j7k6 8y ago

Whenever I come across one of those articles promoting "use Firefox instead of Chrome" I wonder if I'm the only one having those huge performance issues with Firefox on macOS. I seriously tried to make the switch from Chrome to Firefox a few times in the recent years because of all the dark patterns Google is pushing upon its userbase with Chrome, version after version. But Firefox feels significantly slower, makes the MBP fans go crazy and drains the battery like hell. I've come to the conclusion that at this point it's no option for me to make the final switch to Firefox, as much as I'd like to. But I try to cut off Google's prying eyes from my browsing behaviour as much as possible: - uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger is all you need to block the most nasty privacy invaders, seriously. - I don't use the sync feature. - I don't use Gmail, so there's no reason to login to my Google account, ever. - I used Youtube's thumbs-up button as sort of bookmarks for my favorite videos, now I have a bookmarks folder for Youtube videos, which is ok for me, but might not be for everybody. - automatically clear browsing data after quitting Chrome. My dream browser would be Firefox with Chromium under the hood, but that's not very likely to happen...

vehemenz 8y ago
You're not the only one. Firefox uses way too much GPU power on MBPs. Supposedly fixes are in the works, but I doubt they will happen any time soon. I've learned to tune out the 'improvements to performance' claimed by Firefox releases because never actually do anything for MBP users. Like you, it is one of the main things keeping me to Chrome (although pinch-to-zoom and casting are nice, too). My solution for Chrome's privacy issues are similar to yours, except I use the full sync for bookmarks, but then I switch to a private window for actually using any Google site (except for search). At the end of the day, it's still a huge compromise. I might try going full Chromium for a while and trying your bookmarks method, although plugins are a bit of a PITA.
- j7k6 8y ago
  The only reason I'm not using Chromium is that 1Password is not trusting it as a "secure browser".
  - 8y ago

ibm5100 8y ago

I always assumed Mozilla has too much of a little brother relationship with Google to trust that they are truly independent. I use Brave and it's good enough for my browser expectations.

OrgNet 8y ago

How does switching to a third party DNS increase privacy? might as well use your ISP's server since they already know what sites that you visit (unless you use a VPN and this article doesn't talk about that)

alkonaut 8y ago

The canvas and referrer plugins are new to me. This is great. I always wondered why canvas is enabled by default. The ratio of useful to tracking uses has to be 1:10.

lucb1e 8y ago

My only remark is that changing dns to an external server is detrimental to privacy, speed, and arguably security. I'll focus on privacy because that's the article's focus. The power of tracking comes from a central organisation being able to follow almost everyone. Having a birthday calendar on your toilet that your friends can also look at is not creepy, but a worldwide central birthday database might be creepy depending on how private you consider the information. Similarly, changing all our DNSes to 1.1.1.1 is giving Cloudflare, the NSA, and anyone who hacked Cloudflare or any intermediate router (such as your ISP's internal routers and backbone Internet routers), the ability to track our dns requests. If you leave it set to the default, probably your ISP, then someone would have to hack all ISPs on the planet to track all of it. Furthermore, if you're not paying for it... I'm paying my ISP, but not Cloudflare. Unlike XS4ALL, the ISP I have a contract with, I have no legal guarantees regarding what happens to the data from Cloudflare.

saagarjha 8y ago
In the United States, there are probably three or four ISPs that together serve a majority of the population. So there's not much difference there.
- SamuelAdams 8y ago
  Exactly. And most consumers do not have a choice what ISP to use. So their options are either a) Use comcast's DNS [comcast has had a history of doing questionable things] or b) use another DNS like cloudflare that claims to be safe / secure / morale. Short of running your own DNS server, there's not exactly a lot of options.
godshatter 8y ago
On the other hand, Cloudflare doesn't know me from Adam but my ISP has my billing information. It basically depends on your threat model. I'm pretty sure I'm way down the ladder for the NSA, but maybe I don't want an employee at my local ISP getting in a tizzy about me because I frequent sites they don't like. And who knows in today's world what websites might outrage them? I live in a small town. This might actually be a thing I need to worry about. This discussion is prompting me to look into dnscrypt as a short-term solution.

superkuh 8y ago

The most important and easiest step is installing NoScript and going temporary whitelist only.

kgwxd 8y ago

"Be sure to turn off uBlock Origin and Smart Referer for sites that you value" No. Anyone that cares are privacy should have a strict no-whitelisting policy. Find a way to advertise without third-part scripts, find some other way to make money, stop trying to monetize all together, or just stop existing.

npsimons 8y ago
> find some other way to make money In this day and age of things like Patreon, there's really no excuse. I've taken the initiative and pay for Youtube Premium, on top of which I pay through Patreon to channels I view a lot. I also pay for ad-free music streaming.
LocalPCGuy 8y ago
I believe this is a personal choice to potentially give up privacy for sites a person values and/or trusts. It's fine for you to believe that no site should make money via advertising, but others can have a different view and act on that opinion.

captn3m0 8y ago

This misses out on the fact that ISPs regularly employ Transparent DNS Proxies and your DNS requests may never actually reach CloudFlare. Using something like DoH or DNSCrypt is the only real solution for now till OS support for DoH or DoTLS rolls out.

BadassFractal 8y ago

Never heard of Startpage before. How trustworthy is it compared to DDG?

timbit42 8y ago
At least they're not Google. So even if they are collecting data about what you're searching for, they have less data to link it to and probably less power to use it than Google does.

doctorRetro 8y ago

The argument for switching to Firefox seems weak. I don't doubt there are very solid reasons to do so, however the author's argument comes down to "I, personally, just trust this one more, and I'm lazy and don't want to worry about it." Okay.... that's nice.

timbit42 8y ago
Chrome tracks you even if you're not logged into your Google account. Another good reason to support and use Firefox is that we don't want to end up with only one browser engine, giving Google complete control over the future of the web and the rest of the internet.
- doctorRetro 8y ago
  See, that's a perfectly valid and logical reason right there. Unfortunately, the author didn't go into that and just left it at personal preference.

tareqak 8y ago

Here is a quote from the Smart Referer section: It's kind of a dick move to the sites you like since it removes valuable analytics for them, so you can (and should) whitelist domains that you want to keep sharing data with. Why removing that information a "dick move"? When I visit a bank, restaurant, or grocery store, those places don't know where I came from before entering the store unless I have merchandise from other places. The most they can gather is that what clothing I'm currently wearing and if they keep tabs on my previous visits.

kaxline 8y ago
I'm thinking more of media sites that rely on ad dollars to pay the bills. Unless they have a direct subscription option or other way to pay for the service, you're eating into their bottom line. The real world analog would be newspapers and the ads they run.
- tareqak 8y ago
  Even then, newspapers either run ads without needing to know who their customers are, or solicit this information from their customers voluntarily. People like my parents don't know that a referer is involved unless it is explicitly pointed out to them.

pard68 8y ago

> DNS > Cloudflare How about dnscrypt? The DNS servers offered through dnscrypt are much more trustworthy IMHO. Also it is trivial to setup n DNS servers and to randomly select a different server on each request, removing a bulk of that centralized nature of DNS.

parliament32 8y ago

The guide was fine until "Switch DNS to 1.1.1.1". The real solution is to use your own DNS resolver (I've been running Bind on my laptop for years with no issues). If that's not an option, it's still far better to keep using your ISP's resolvers -- yes, your ISP may be evil, but at least you're their customer. When a separate for-profit company provides a "free" service, how can the product be anything but your personal data?

auslander 8y ago

For DNS, Quad9 is a better choice than Cloudflare, as it is a not-for-profit public-benefit organization, CF is for profit company

Tecuane 8y ago
I believe that at one stage the Quad9 resolvers were owned by IBM. A brief look at the site indicates it was transferred to CleanerDNS, which is a 501(c)(3). Do you know how much involvement IBM still has in the project, if any?

0xCMP 8y ago

If you're going to install uBlock Origin then I recommend looking at uMatrix (same author) which does all the same thing but gives you much, much more control. It can be annoying and force a lot of refreshes, but it blocks a lot more things more consistently than anything else.

3xblah 8y ago

"Firefox is developed by a non-profit company, Mozilla, explicitly dedicated to users' needs. Google and Microsoft make money off of users in different ways and we can never be sure that their business decisions are going to align with what we would want as users." This gives short shrift to what is a complex set of interdependencies. All these browsers rely on the existence of web advertising, including Firefox. Are web ads among "users' needs"? Who decides what comprise users' needs? Users? The reality is that whatever Mozilla defines as "users' needs" will also, at least in part, represent the needs of the company authoring the competing web browser. That is because the Firefox authors are paid indirectly from the coffers of their competitor. Mozilla Foundation cannot take a stand against web advertising because its competitors rely on web advertising to make money. And Mozilla Foundation in turn relies on money from its competitors to pay its employees. Mozilla is aligned to some extent with the business decisions of its competitor. Ideally employees of Mozilla Foundation would be volunteers and Mozilla Foundation would pay them solely from donations from users. This is not what happens. Mozilla Corporation (for-profit) can, e.g., sell access to Firefox users' searches to Mozilla's competitors. e.g., Google. The profits might then be used to pay Mozilla Foundation employees. Some of those employees might leave and go to work for Google to start a competing browser. Firefox may be the lesser of multiple evils, but let's be honest it is not solely dedicated to users' needs. It has its own needs -- paying 100's of employees -- and, given the current arrangement, it must to some extent serve the needs of its competitor in order to meet them. If for example there was a user who did not wish to support the web ads business then Mozilla's decisions could never align 100% with what that user would want because she does not want to support the web ads business. Mozilla is paying employees by doing business with a competitor that gathers user data and sells access to users to advertisers. I am not downplaying the value of Mozilla. I am only pointing out that they are probably not 100% aligned with all users. They are also partially aligned with their competitor who is selling ads in order to make money.

kaxline 8y ago
Great points, thanks for posting. I'll try to incorporate this nuance in future posts.

known 8y ago

https://www.opennic.org/ https://www.opennic.org/ DNS servers are better than 1.1.1.1

kaxline 8y ago

There were a lot of questions about VPNs in response to this post, so I addressed them here: https://thetoolsweneed.com/one-sorta-simple-way-to-vastly-improve-your-privacy-online/ https://thetoolsweneed.com/one-sorta-simple-way-to-vastly-im...