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Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

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31–40 of 64 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#31

You're pretty much covered. uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger is awesome. You can add something like Tab Cookies or Self Destructing Cookies. You can also add something like uMatrix to the mix. If you really want to go far, add a "User-Agent Switcher" type extension. I wouldn't add more than this though, it starts to be overkill. Also do note: I used to use noscript and it works well, but going from 0 JS on a domain to…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#32
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely hope you don't do this. You're trusting that the people who run that site won't turn malicious in the future; and since your link uses http, you are also trusting that the same applies to their ISP, your ISP, or anyone in between!

Yeah, someone might hijack localhost's address. They might even be so nefarious as to submit RFCs to make that address range publicly routable.

Not the person you are responding to, but it's obvious he's referring to the suggestion that you automatically update the hosts file from the URL.

> set up a refresh script to replace it periodically.

Especially considering the https version of the page isn't valid.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#33
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely hope you don't do this. You're trusting that the people who run that site won't turn malicious in the future; and since your link uses http, you are also trusting that the same applies to their ISP, your ISP, or anyone in between!

Yeah, someone might hijack localhost's address. They might even be so nefarious as to submit RFCs to make that address range publicly routable.

`x.x.x.x foobar.com`

Where x.x.x.x:80 is a redirect to some malicious site.

Here's hoping foobar.com set up HSTS

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#34

Few folk using Ghostery... but I thought Ghostery was the plugin backed by the advertising industry that just fed your data back to them anyway? I use AdBlock (original) and Disconnect. Perhaps Disconnect does something with my data too shrug

Ghost Rank is opt-in, and it does help the advertising industry: [0] >We rely on Ghostery users who opt-in to participate in a feature called Ghostrank®, which sends us anonymous information about the data collection technology they see, and where they see them. We take that information, add our analysis, and sell it to companies to help them audit and manage their relationships with these marketing tools. None of th…

Thanks for this. I just installed ghostery and I'm still reading up on it. I don't have a problem with advertising and people making money and studying usage. I do have a problem with attempts at tracking individual users and trying to create individual user profiles. I like how you started your list at zero.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#35
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but what's the overlap with uBlock Origin of privacy.trackingprotection? It's very unclear to me. After some experiments and log inspections when it was released I concluded uBlock was a superset. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Asked myself the same question, did the same experiment, and reached the same conclusion :) . Another unclear thing is the update rate/policy of privacy.trackingprotection's blacklist.

Good to hear :)

What's your addon setup then?

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#36

You're pretty much covered. uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger is awesome. You can add something like Tab Cookies or Self Destructing Cookies. You can also add something like uMatrix to the mix. If you really want to go far, add a "User-Agent Switcher" type extension. I wouldn't add more than this though, it starts to be overkill. Also do note: I used to use noscript and it works well, but going from 0 JS on a domain to…

from the page it looks like privacy badger is similar to noscript, care to explain how it's better than noscript?

noscript also has "forbid", "temporarily allow", and "allow" settings for blocking domains

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#37

I use HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin, Random Agent Spoofer with almost everything checked, Self Destructing Cookies and uMatrix. I do not recommend Ghostery at all, since it is closed source and it collects your data through GhostRank, if enabled.

Spoofing user agents will sort of defeat UA-based tracking, but so will using the stock UA for the most common version of your browser. I think it would make more sense to find the most common Firefox UA and switch to that. Probably something like this: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:39.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/39.0".

The advantage here is that you aren't likely to run across weird behavior from sites that sniff UA to determine feature set. That's clearly gross behavior, but it's also necessary. For instance, there's no way to determine if a browser supports JPEG2000 other than to sniff the UA for Safari -- it doesn't send an appropriate Accept header. Likewise for many other situations.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#38
post #36

You're pretty much covered. uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger is awesome. You can add something like Tab Cookies or Self Destructing Cookies. You can also add something like uMatrix to the mix. If you really want to go far, add a "User-Agent Switcher" type extension. I wouldn't add more than this though, it starts to be overkill. Also do note: I used to use noscript and it works well, but going from 0 JS on a domain to…

from the page it looks like privacy badger is similar to noscript, care to explain how it's better than noscript? noscript also has "forbid", "temporarily allow", and "allow" settings for blocking domains

Tried out Privacy Badger and had some bugs early on, refused to block certain domains and did not block things by default which I would expect.

I prefer noscript.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#39
> My goal is to make my browser as private as possible with minimal damage to my usual browsing experience.

Not very long ago I wrote a guide documenting my specific configuration which has precisely this goal in mind [1].

The short version: disable third-party cookies, enable tracking protection (Firefox only), use uBlock Origin with some extra filters, use HTTPS everywhere, Enforce Click-to-Play and Disable Unnecessary Plug-ins.

One tweak I don't cover in the guide that I think I like is disabling custom fonts. In Firefox this is under Options > Content > Advanced > uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above". The privacy benefit here is probably negligible, but I quite like that I don't have to wait for giant remote fonts on everyone's blog to load.

[1] https://brashear.me/blog/2015/08/11/hardening-firefox-to-pro...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best ad-blocking, privacy-enhancing extension set up?

#40

> My goal is to make my browser as private as possible with minimal damage to my usual browsing experience. Not very long ago I wrote a guide documenting my specific configuration which has precisely this goal in mind [1]. The short version: disable third-party cookies, enable tracking protection (Firefox only), use uBlock Origin with some extra filters, use HTTPS everywhere, Enforce Click-to-Play and Disable Unneces…

I use basically this setup with one additional plugin: Noscript. But this has more to do with browser safety than privacy, in that I don't want some shady third party site getting to run whatever JS they want on my machine.
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