16 ms·
How to Avoid Leaving Tracks Around the Internet
- mellosouls 7y ago"Don't read paywalled articles." They missed that one off.
- savvyraccoon 7y agoStep 1 - do not create a free account or logging to read The Times
- orangepanda 7y ago> A few more suggestions: > “Create a different email address for every service you use,” wrote Matt McHenry. “Then you can tell which one has shared your info, and create filters to silence them if necessary.” Obligatory mention - for gmail you can suffix your email address with a service name by using +, e.g., johndoe+adobe@gmail.com will be delivered to johndoe@gmail.com. So if a service leaks your data or sells your email, you’ll know who to blame. Although the article recommends not to use gmail, it’s a neat trick if you’re stuck with it. "Forget password" becomes unusable though, since you’ll probably forget what suffix you used for each service.
- zowie 7y agoOutlook.com supports this as well, and so does Fastmail.
- inapis 7y agoOh companies have become smarter about it! Even the scammers I suspect! Many won’t accept + in the email address and I think now it’s well known enough that most scammers will run a regex to detect and remove the + sign. Useful workaround is to have unique aliases on a domain name you control. Can’t get around that with a minute of work!
- kps 7y agoIf you control your email, you can do slightly better with the ‘+’. Share addresses of the form ‘me+my-tag@’, strip on ‘-’ to deliver these to ‘me+my@’, and have ‘me@’ immediately block the sender.
- Macha 7y agoIf you control your own email, why not just have company@ ?
- garren 7y agofastmail supports a variation of this: if my email is me@mydomain.com, then I can use service+me@mydomain.com, or better service@me.mydomain.com (or anything@me.mydomain.com). It seems like it'd be a little less obvious to scammers.
- johnpowell 7y agoWith fastmail you can just make a alias. My address is me@mydomain.com and in the settings you can make a alias where you can just use something like garbage@mydomain.com https://i.imgur.com/UWoU4NA.png https://i.imgur.com/UWoU4NA.png
- atomwaffel 7y agoFastmail also lets you use wildcards and catchall addresses, giving you infinite email addresses whenever you need them, with no way to tell what “base address” they resolve to internally. For example, my Twitter address might be twitter@mydomain.com, my Google address google@mydomain.com and so on. All of those go straight to my inbox unless I decide to set up individual filters for them. The downside is that I can’t easily migrate to a service that doesn’t support this.
- jen729w 7y agoShout-out to my new mail provider Migadu [0] whose model is “pay for the number of emails you send, not the number of mailboxes you have”. This opens up all sorts of interesting opportunities. Not affiliated, just a happy customer. [0]: https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html
- muterad_murilax 7y ago"." works the same way.
- adambyrtek 7y agoNot the same way. The dot would be filtered out, but the part after the dot won't get removed, so john.smith@gmail.com is equivalent to johnsmith@gmail.com.
- muterad_murilax 7y agoAh, you're right of course. I was too quick to reply. Sorry.
- nishmastime 7y agoWell, another problem is that if you reuse email addresses, then a social engineering attacker has an easy starting place across all services.
- pmlnr 7y agoOr set up a mail server and add as many aliases as you with, one for each service.
- mandeepj 7y ago>since you’ll probably forget what suffix you used for each service You can put that in a safe wallet. OneDrive provides that now
- saagarjha 7y ago> If you’re in that category, Ms. Winterton recommended Ghostery, a free plug-in for most web browsers that “blocks the trackers and lists them by category,” she wrote. I’m not sure I can recommend Ghostery, as their business model is a bit suspicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism > Using websites whose addresses begin with https are also safe; they, too, encrypt their data before it’s sent to your browser (and vice versa). Safe from your public Wi-Fi operator. Not from the company with a tracking script on the page. > You don’t sign into Apple Maps or Safari (Apple’s web browser) You sign into the OS, though. > You never want to tell Facebook where you were born and your date of birth. That’s 98 percent of someone stealing your identity! I can literally Google this information. We need to stop treating knowledge of public data like this as some sort of identity metric.
- pteraspidomorph 7y agoI would suggest Privacy Badger nowadays (as a complement to the irreplaceable uBlock origin).
- jrcii 7y agoAdd to that Cookie Autodelete and uMatrix
- aesh2Xa1 7y agoDoes Privacy Badger do something that uBlock Origin does not?
- samschooler 7y agoInstead of having built in lists, it dynamically tries to track the trackers and block domains/cookies it thinks are trying to track you.
- fabiomaia 7y agoBeen wondering this for a while even though I have both installed
- aszantu 7y agoNothing new go away paywall
- okasaki 7y ago> Apple’s privacy website reveals many examples: You don’t sign into Apple Maps or Safari (Apple’s web browser), so your searches and trips aren’t linked to you. Not linked... in a way visible to you.
- Causality1 7y agoI think there are different categories of "tracks". One category is marketing tracks, which include cookies, browser profiling, tracking scripts, etc. This is the one most discussion on HN is aimed at and most people find personally offensive but aren't materially harmed by. The second is legal tracks, which is exposure to harm from legal authorities for activities such as piracy, political activism, and various types of forbidden speech under different legal/national regimes. The third type is personal tracks, which I categorize as the ability for private individuals or groups to connect your online presence to your real self. That is the one I'm most concerned with, as internet users seem almost entirely unconcerned about it but it has far more potential to harm you than Google knowing your sexual fetishes. Nobody cares that they're exposing their real name and face to millions of people and it only takes one lunatic who decides your activities or opinions are worth trying to ruin your life to cause you a world of hurt.
- cloudyo 7y ago-Use a private cloud, so that your data is in your control. We've actually developed a self-hosted private cloud solution as a substitute to Dropbox for exactly these reasons. Basically a private Dropbox at home (no complicated installation and no server needed) We're currently in beta, could interest a few in this thread! https://www.duple.io/en/ https://www.duple.io/en/ The point is to have a product that works just like a Dropbox, as simple and straightforward, but that is actually private with no one interfering, playing, accessing or reading your data.
- badrabbit 7y agoYou know, ipfs helps a lot with this. If I can pay for someone to mirror whatever I host on my ipfs and tie it to some account it would be neat. Good luck on your product. Seems promising. But I didn't like how your site loaded slowly (just a subjective feedback)
- alpaca128 7y agoSomehow I don't understand how you say Syncthing's disadvantage in comparison is that it's a P2P system[1], but at the same time your website says duple doesn't need a server. Maybe I've misunderstood, but this sounds just like Syncthing with an always-on client - except for the file versioning, that sounds like an interesting feature to me. [1] https://blog.duple.io/what-is-the-point-of-duple/ https://blog.duple.io/what-is-the-point-of-duple/
- tryptophan 7y agoSyncthing does file versioning, although a bit noobishly. It just keeps n copies of the old file in a hidden folder with DATE_MODIFED appended to each copy.
- windexh8er 7y agoAgreed. I've been using SyncThing for over 4 years and while it has a few rough edges (synced/shared/global file ignore would be great) still it's been fully reliable and a generally great user experience. So if you're trying to cater to existing SyncThing users don't mince words to make it appear that something which you claim is a negative with SyncThing doesn't exist in your product - which it clearly does. SyncThing has a huge advantage: years of trust. They have been around since 2013 and continue to crank out features and builds consistently. Duple hasn't been around for one year at the time of this writing. Beyond that it's clear from the Duple site that it's main goal is to take my data and file replication hostage via licensing fees. I'm curious how or why I'd donate before I've even installed the Beta (based on your click flow to even reach the downloads page)? No thanks. Also, let's clarify something Duple has wrong... Duple states: "Syncthing is P2P, so you get the disadvantages along with it e.g. all your devices need to be turned on at the same time. If not, you get a desynchronisation between your devices and create conflict." - This is wrong. You do not need all your devices on at the same time with SyncThing. Yes, it is true that it's good to have a device with a consistent state, however it's not required. The second part of the statement is FUD. When conflicts happen it's generally around odd permissions or file updates with regard to versioning. This was more problematic in versions prior to 1.0. At this point in time I haven't run into this issue other than because of disparate problems caused by file permissions which SyncThing does a great job preserving. Duple also states SyncThing has no IOS support and yet, itself, has neither IOS or Android. Or Windows... Or an open source repo of what I'm supposedly using. In my mind Duple doesn't compete with SyncThing and, really, never will. But here's the thing... Don't pretend to compete where you don't. SyncThing users aren't looking for Duple. You'd do yourself a better service to take that verbiage out because all it did for me was give me the impression that Duple is lying about competitors that they simply didn't take the time to understand. That leaves a bad impression in my mind.
- hbcondo714 7y ago> Avoid unnecessary web tracking Google is just one of 100+ ad networks that show you personalized ads. You can turn off ads personalization from Google or any of the other participating ad networks here at http://optout.aboutads.info/ http://optout.aboutads.info/ Source: https://adssettings.google.com https://adssettings.google.com
- joosters 7y agoJust because they no longer show you personalised ads doesn't mean they have stopped tracking you...
- TheVikingOwain 7y agoIn fact I’d argue it means they have to track you. And telling them your preference gives them another data point on you.
- 9dl 7y agoYeah Evil corporation never lies to you
- JohnFen 7y agoAs others have said, there's a huge difference between "not showing you personalized ads" and "not tracking you". But I really wanted to opine about the optout.aboutads.info link. I suppose that using that can't hurt, but I didn't find it to be particularly helpful. I gave up on it entirely quite a while back.
- known 7y agohttps://www.torproject.org/download/ https://www.torproject.org/download/ is the best
- known 7y agohttps://archive.is/QiBdd https://archive.is/QiBdd
- dt3ft 7y agoThanks for the effort, but this link does not work. The host is not responding. Edit: sorry, my bad, cloudflare 1.1.1.1 resolves it as 127.0.0.5. Someone ought to check that out... Edit2: apparently this is a deep rabbit hole: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/18227/10 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182...
- soulofmischief 7y agoIs this the level of technical competency needed to work at the New York Times? How much do they pay?
- snlnspc 7y agoif you look up some info on this writer, I think you'll find competency was not considered
- saagarjha 7y agoHey now, there's no need to attack the author like this.
- snlnspc 7y agothis is not a technical position managing security. most tech writers at major news institutions are likely not tested with technical interviews - they are writers with domain knowledge, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that.
- fattire 7y ago"Safari’s “don’t track me” features are turned on as the factory setting."
- saagarjha 7y agoI'm not sure where you're going with that comment.
- angry_octet 7y agoWell, they just made their director of infosec redundant, so it seems the answer is yes. https://twitter.com/runasand/status/1186775481615605760?s=20 https://twitter.com/runasand/status/1186775481615605760?s=20
- dt3ft 7y agoOh the irony. Reading this article requires me to give away my e-mail address...
- seriocomic 7y agoOr click the "Reader Mode" in Firefox? (YMMV).
- mirimir 7y agoYes, if you do it fast enough, before the paywall loads.
- rchaud 7y agoI was able to read the article by opening it on a browser I rarely use. But even then, an email ask isn't "tracking", and you can always use a throwaway account if you want. As the article itself suggests, use a different email for each service you sign up for. The NYT is a content website in a sea of content websites. Getting you on their email list is valuable in the way that getting you to install their app is valuable; they can send you notifications and a few free articles that can maybe upsell you into a subscription. They have no choice but to do this because we still think text and pictures on the internet should be free. We've come around to paying for music and videos, but it still seems too much of a hurdle for traditional news outlets.
- codedokode 7y agoWhat about fingerprinting? Fingerprinting allows to track browser even in private mode or if you anonymize your IP address. You should disable WebGL right now because it is absolutely unnecessary, almost never used and its only purpose is to collect information about your video card.
- archie2 7y agoThe New York Times: a former newspaper.
- asveikau 7y agoIn the long run, they're all former newspapers, aren't they?
- brassattax 7y agoI had to clear my NY Times cookies to read the article. The irony.
- tejtm 7y agowell, we can't blame it on their head of cyber security.
- goatinaboat 7y agoCan you expand on this?
- tejtm 7y agoNY times recently fired/made redundant their head of cyber security https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21329453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21329453
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- semiotagonal 7y ago> Nearby patrons, using their phones or laptops, can easily see everything you’re sending or receiving — email and website contents, for example — using free “sniffer” programs. Is the author assuming the absence of https encryption here, or is there some widely available exploit I don't know about?
- 9dl 7y agomitm for weak https exists All "antiviruses" use it
- elorant 7y agoInstall uMatrix and block all 3rd party JavaScript. It breaks functionality in some sites that embed social networks' widgets, but other than that works like a charm. As a bonus sites load at least 30% faster.
- 9dl 7y agoThis is bare minimum
- freedomben 7y agoExactly my experience, going on 3 to 4 years now. Spend the time to learn uMatrix. It's an incredible investment into yourself and your web experience. I barely browse on mobile anymore since I don't have uMatrix, although Brave does allow blocking scripts and some stuff quite easily. Highly recommend Brave on mobile.
- chopin 7y agoI have Firefox and uMatrix on mobile. It is not a s seamless as desktop but bearable.
- freedomben 7y agoNice, thanks for the tip! I'll have to give it a try
- ozim 7y agoI use uMatrix lazy style - if go to page and it works without changes I use it - if it breaks but I need to use it allow all - if it breaks but I don't care that much close the tab.
- 0-_-0 7y agoYou can do that in uBlock Origin too.
- 9dl 7y agoThat what looks like when someone gives advises when know nothing about industry and tech And that is not even funny
- ntetsuo 7y agoWe should rename hacker news to the New York Times reader.
- buboard 7y agoUnreadable . Does it mention E2E? It's way past time for tech to get serious about E2E , ignoring warnings and pleas from greedy governments. People have a right to communicate without being constantly surveilled, and it's the most serious track they leave.
- not_kurt_godel 7y agoThe omission of "Disable third party cookies" is fairly shocking. From my understanding, it might be the single most effective thing you can reduce tracking. Whenever I get the chance, I recommend the following pieces of Internet hygiene to anyone and everyone I can: * Disable 3rd party cookies * uBlock Origin * Privacy Badger * HTTPS Everywhere These things are all dead simple and will significantly reduce your trackability. Of course they are far from comprehensive or perfect, but it's the Internet equivalent of washing your hands after you go to the bathroom.
- Mediterraneo10 7y agoWon’t disabling third-party cookies render certain payment gateways unusable? While such advice may be very welcome among savvy computer users who know when they should temporarily turn third-party cookies back on, the NYT is unlikely to give advice that will break online shopping for large numbers of people.
- not_kurt_godel 7y agoI've had 3p cookies disabled for years and never experienced an issue with payments. But, it may be that I don't pay for things as often as others. My recommendations will slightly break some things like embedded Twitter posts but it's rare that I experience a site being functionally impacted in ways I care about.
- ilikepi 7y agoI don't think I've ever run into an issue with a payment gateway. The one major site I've had issues with has been playstation.com. Sony seems to use a bunch of different domains for managing its various PSN websites, and I've never found the right set of rules in uMatrix without also enabling third-party cookies.
- doctoboggan 7y agoWith the latest macOS it is no longer possible to install uBlock Origin in Safari. Do you have a different recommendation that works with Catalina?
- oriettaxx 7y agothey forgot the best tip nowadays which is: * declare you are from EU even if you are not then any provider is damned scared of messing with your privacy
- Moeg 7y agoAn article about how to not leave tracks on the internet, requires me to sign up to read the said article, magnificent.
- vonseel 7y agoCVS receipt coupons are based upon previous purchases + like 15% randomization in related categories (or maybe just random promotions they have going). My CVS coupons are nearly always for an antacid, nicotine cessation, or allergy medicine - then I usually get a few extra coupons for something that surprises me like beauty products or facial cleanser. There’s nothing Google involved with the CVS coupons, I’d bet money on that.
- leoh 7y agoNo mention of using encrypted DNS. Or did I miss it?
- mirimir 7y agoOK, it's not horrible advice. But there's no mention of Tor, which is arguably the best available way to "avoid leaving tracks around the Internet". And better yet, using Whonix, which prevents leaks around Tor. Using multiple email addresses is good. But if you're sloppy about browser hardening, they'll all get linked. More generally, there's compartmentalization. Not just multiple email addresses, but multiple VMs, connecting through different VPNs, and/or Tor instances. Modern machines can run several Linux VMs, and switching among them is as easy as switching among app windows. So basically you can present online as many different personas. Even if everything that each persona does gets linked, it won't get linked to other personas. If you're careful, anyway.
- cartoonworld 7y ago> More generally, there's compartmentalization. Not just multiple email addresses, but multiple VMs, connecting through different VPNs, and/or Tor instances. Modern machines can run several Linux VMs, and switching among them is as easy as switching among app windows. Shout out to https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/ Qubes OS, an Open Source research implementation of this concept on the OS level. BYO OPSEC.
- mirimir 7y agoYeah, love Qubes too. The learning curve for that is steeper than for VirtualBox, however. As is, with absolutely no doubt, the security level. In that it uses a hardened version of the Xen hypervisor. That also means tighter hardware requirements, however.
- cartoonworld 7y agoI agree fully. I would be really interested in generalizing their security model amongst more (probably inadequate) hardware. We can dream :)
- mirimir 7y agoSome years ago, after reading beta-level posts about Qubes, I implemented as best I could in VirtualBox. I used pfSense VMs as VPN gateways, and Linux VMs for workspace. While I was at it, I used multiple pfSense VMs to create nested VPN chains. Sort of like Tor circuits, but static (so much less anonymous) but also much faster. Then Whonix came along. And it works very well with nested VPN chains.
- gorgoiler 7y agoI don’t know how one would know short of a leak if Facebook’s track_ip_addresses.php, but is there any sense of how IPv6 is being aggregated by trackers to track identity? We have a /48 at home using IPv6 privacy extensions for the full address but that isn’t a useful component of a strategy if I’m being identified by the /48 rather than the full 128-bit address.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- MikeGale 7y agoI'm not familiar with a survey of how many know these things (and the good suggestions made here). My suspicion is that few know, and fewer are doing it. An important goal? Help those who care enough become aware enough to take action.
- gocartStatue 7y agoI find this: > Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode." quite ironic :)
- fonosip 7y agoFor a public cloud replacement, try https://ba.net/privatecloudoffice https://ba.net/privatecloudoffice