Privacy Is Not Dead: Beware the All-or-Nothing Mindset

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> We recommend Mullvad Browser if you are focused on strong privacy protections and anti-fingerprinting out of the box

Just want to put emphasis on “out of the box”. Changing any of the default settings will cause you to stand out. The fingerprinting protection is essentially to have a bunch of people all using the same browser with all of the mechanisms used for fingerprinting being either disabled or giving the same results on all installations; everyone has the same fingerprint.

"Binary thinking" and "zero-sum game framing" are (ime) extremely common logical facilities that affect even highly educated people. I think the reason for this is that these framing are approximate solutions. But truth is that approximate solutions are often insufficient. Very few things are zero-sum games once we incorporate that pesky variable "time". I often see this framing with economics, yet a rising tide lifts all ships and even poor men (in developed countries at least) are far better off than kings of old. Similarly, one of the greatest advancements in logic in the 20th century was where (one of) my namesake noted that a binary decision has a third answer: "indeterminate"[0]. This is also at the heart of both computer science (halting) and physics.

I see this mindset a lot with privacy, and I think a lot of it is apathy or more that people have been run down. I'm at the tail end of a CS PhD and I even have a hard time convincing people in my program to communicate with me over Signal vs text. Common answers being "they have my data anyways" and people buying into a whole ecosystem. But truth is, fragmenting your data is an important part to data privacy. You minimize what you can, and what you leak you try to distribute. Information's power is in its aggregation, so you make it harder to aggregate.

I think it is the same as with security. There's no real perfect security[1], and realistically security is more about putting up speed bumps than impenetrable doors. Just sometimes your speed bump is so large that you got to build a car that couldn't fit on the road if you want to make it over (you can always brute force a password). The goal is to make it too expensive, too time consuming, or too costly to use that route or maybe even to attempt an attack in the first place. The same is true for privacy. Make them pay more for that data. Make it harder to aggregate. Make your data as noisy or indistinguishable from noise as possible (small footprints are better than extra footprints). Because this isn't a zero-sum game instantaneous game, this is a constant battle and it is always cat and mouse.

But I do think we as the programmers, the developers, the makers, should also have a serious talk about the consequences of surveillance capitalism. With any engineering, it is always easy to get caught up in the upsides and downplay the downsides. The path to hell is paved with good intentions, not malice[2]. Every engineer has to have a code of ethics, surely Ethan Zuckerman didn't foresee the hell he created, and had good intentions. While we don't build bridges that can collapse (actually... we do) there can be no doubt that information can be weaponized. It seems no matter what your politics are that this is recognizable and in conversation. And I think these conversations can still be had in an apolitical setting (which I hope we will do here, but I understand the pull towards that direction[3]). I do encourage apolitical discussions because these can be had within the workplace and can be had without starting fights. I do believe that many people will often find themselves on the same side when had conversations not initiated this way they would not have. At the end of the day, it requires a community to make these changes and even if we disagree on some things that doesn't prevent us from working together towards common goals.

[0] Godel was said to have been inspired by the paradox "this statement is false" but that's probably folklore. "Indeterminate" here is equivalent to "this statement cannot be proved"

[1] Okay, I know, but if you know then you know what I mean here

[2] I think it is important to recognize that evil is often created when good men are trying their best. So be careful when making attributions, because evil is sly and subtle. If it weren't, we'd have purged it long ago.

[3] I believe that the discussion around "Turnkey Tyranny" often helps with keeping things apolitical. Because one needs not say that any one party is or will become tyrannical, but we can remain abstract in a future scenario and consider the risk-reward calculus (I'm sure more relevant than ever).

  > Let’s say IP address, fingerprinting and cookies.

This will still not lead to a binary outcome. Cookies can be deleted and fingerprints aren't perfect. Nor is Google able to obtain this data from sites equally. Amazon and Facebook certainly are not sharing liberally, as this is a big part of their revenue streams too. Their competition can benefit us in our defense.

You also forget time. There is historical data, current data, and future data. You can tackle all of these, and they should be addressed differently. You can remove data and that can prevent future players or potential sales of your data. But we should also be really aware that the future data is most important. You change over time and they want to track these changes. The more you can limit their access, the more you fight back. One easy method is to use email masks. You can do this for free or relatively cheap, but I've changed most of my logins to unique emails as well as unique passwords (fwiw, Mozilla Relay integrates into Bitwarden, making this simple). I've now been able to track who is leaking my information to who, and better adapt to the environment. It also means that if one of these sites gets hacked than I can easily burn that email address and not be forever locked in a circulating list.

So I just want you to realize, you haven't been defeated yet. As long as you generate new data, there is time for you to fight back.

Most are, most are affiliate link-farms in disguise as well, and privacyguides.org is written in response to such guides.

It is called privacy guides and not security guides for a reason, and many of our basic "recommendations" are geared towards a specific threat model that does not include, for example, being targeted by law enforcement or others with access to zero-day vulnerabilities or similarly targeted exploits. They are geared towards avoiding commercial-grade tracking, especially by corporations, and dragnet mass surveillance programs.

This is why we place so much of an emphasis on threat modeling before suggesting recommendations in the first place though, to make sure readers know exactly when the recommendations apply to them and when they instead need to seek additional resources. We have countless pages within our community forum detailing why and when Chromium is technically superior to Firefox.

This is also why we don't recommend Firefox on mobile devices at all, because while we do feel Firefox on desktop is adequately secure for many people, we don't feel that is the case on Android, unfortunately.

Anyways, thank you for your insight. I will look into making this more clear at a glance.