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Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

robinlinus.github.io

231–240 of 258 posts

Re: Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only ever log into Facebook via a VPN to a remote VPS using a private window on a browser I don't use for anything else. And also... Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 6309 packets, 599K bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination 330 19800 REJECT all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 match-set block-facebook-ips dst reject-with icmp-port-unreachable I have an ipset that matches FB networks.

Yikes. Sounds easier just to not use Facebook.

There in lies the problem, all those Facebook widgets on various 3rd party websites are used to track you. If you block FB's network ranges then it gets much harder for them to do that.

In effect you are "using" Facebook whether you want to or not; this is the issue some people have with shadow FB profiles.

Re: Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

#233
Blocking third-party cookies gives you full protection in this and other situations without any major annoyances.

Other subcomments here mention it, but every time this comes up it seems most people (including the article) aren't aware that blocking 3rd party cookies is a super easy fix and IMHO should be the default of browsers.

I've only ever had issues with this at my banking site because they use a third party to host their solution (Work around is opening the iframe). But I am now going to ask them to fix this (I guess all it requires is a sudomain pointing to the third party?).

Please help spread the message and ask trouble web sites to fix their shit or if I'm completely wrong, educate me and let's move things forward.

Re: Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

#235

This is why I use 'browser isolation', which is a way to separate different types of surfing activity into different buckets. Currently the best way to do this in Firefox is to create multiple profiles, or in Chrome, you can simply add a different user/persona. Having one profile, or even an entire dedicated browser just for Twitter/FB ensures the login is not spilled over into other sites. If you're surfing the web…

At risk of being depressing, it's worth knowing that a dedicated profiler can reconcile accounts across all of the protections you've mentioned - not just as a targeted attack, but algorithmically. There are a lot of fingerprinting tricks which transcend cookie restrictions and user profiles. The battery percent/value one will reconcile all accounts on one device (as will several other like fonts). If you log into on…

Indeed, you can take this a step further and assign each bucket its own VPN, with JS turned off to minimize fingerprintability. You can even setup multiple virtual machines with multiple screen resolutions on each to further divide up your sessions, making your surfing modified beyond recognition. It might take a weekend or two to wrap your head around VMs and VPNs, but it's worth it.

Also, if you're paranoid about your VPN provider spying on you, you can install HTTP nowhere: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/http-nowhere/ to further compartmentalize the risk of spying. DNS, however is tricky to obfuscate, so I would recommend surfing under broad and generic domains, like TWITTER.com and places like REDDIT.com which often scrape and proxy the content from other sites so you don't need to visit those sites explicitly.

Re: Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

#236
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, the idea that there's a network my traffic flows over, where that traffic is sniffed such that its content could potentially result in things like me losing my job, is just debilitating to me. If I worked for such a company, all my traffic would be flowing over a VPN, full-stop.

> If I worked for such a company, all my traffic would be flowing over a VPN, full-stop. When you work for such a company, all VPNs are blocked and prohibited, full-stop. Source: worked for such a company

Pretty standard in any reasonably secure financial services org.

All direct Internet access is blocked and prohibited, with all attempts to access the Internet (tcp/80, tcp/443) transparently proxied via Bluecoat/Websense/Forcepoint/etc proxies, which filter based on URL categorisation. WSS generally doesn't work in this kind of environment. Everything else is dropped.

Any attempts to bypass filtering is a violation of IT policy and is sackable. Visiting sites that are blocked gets logged, doesn't generally get flagged up unless is a daily occurrence, and the first assumption is usually malware.

Source: Worked for several such companies, was responsible for perimeter security in some.

Re: Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

#238
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I went with EasyList and local EasyList against ads, Fanboy’s Annoyance and Anti-ThirdpartySocial because social media integrations generally annoy me. EasyPrivacy and Fanboy’s Enhanced Tracking List‎ for privacy as well as the Adblock Warning Removal List‎ and this cool thing against the EU cookie failure: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-s... It's not very complete, though.

Why does it generally annoy you?

If I want to share content on a social platform I just copy the link and post it wherever I like. I don't need slow, endless lists of tiny buttons to nudge me into something.

Re: Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

#239
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point you may as well just go full rms and use wget to download pages which you then read offline.

Would it be possible to make a browser plugin to do exactly that?

Well why?

Re: Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

#240
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly easier way is to use the Disconnect/Privacy Badger extensions, along with uBlock Origin. It does a lot to prevent cookies from leaking across sites.

I use all 3 of those and a few others, yet it still detected quite a few sites I was logged in to.

If you're still worried, I'd take the time to learn and use uMatrix (https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix) in addition to uBlock. For me, uMatrix has replaced Privacy Badger and other similar addons because they're no longer needed. It requires a bit more effort to maintain though.
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