To expound upon someguy2's recommendation below, I have since moved on my Arch Linux laptop after reading a dev's blog post[0] to using hostsblock to block a lo

To expound upon someguy2's recommendation below, I have since moved on my Arch Linux laptop after reading a dev's blog post[0] to using hostsblock to block a lot of known domains to redirect to localhost. That, in conjunction with dnsmasq and kwakd (a ~400 LOC web server in C that only returns <html></html>)[2] for all requests makes me worry a lot less. I also use disconnect.me (after discovering the motivation behind Ghostery is just to sell info back to marketers). My only real issue is that kwakd is clearly choking on certain sites (namely Google, which I just back to permanent NoScript blockage) with some of the weirder stuff it does with asynchronous JS calls. Blocking Google completely as a result makes my web experience much, much faster and cleaner. [0] http://jasonwryan.com/blog/2013/12/28/hostsblock/ http://jasonwryan.com/blog/2013/12/28/hostsblock/ [1] http://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/ http://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/ [2] https://code.google.com/p/kwakd https://code.google.com/p/kwakd