zlacker

>>taubek+(OP)
I recommend using an ad-blocker while visiting that site :-/

Lately, I find myself using more and more plugins to make the "modern web" tolerable. To list a few:

Channel Blocker (lets me block channels from search results on Youtube); uBlock Origin; Disconnect; F.B Purity; Consent-O-Matic (auto fill cookie consent forms); Kagi Search; PopUpOFF; Facebook Container; Privacy Badger; ClearURLs; Return YouTube Dislike

Basically, if I visit a website and don't like the experience, I either never go back (Kagi lets me exclude it from search results) or find a plugin to make it tolerable.

What I really want now is the ability to exclude entire websites from any permissions I grant to plugins. I feel like in the last year, I've read a couple stories about companies buying successful plugins and then using them to track you or show ads or whatever. I'm worried this will be the next stage in the battle for our attention -- best case: companies will buy popular plugins to track us and show us intrusive ads; worst case: nefarious actors will buy them to scrape information we think is private and collect it.

IE: I just want to be able to say "Hey, Firefox... those permissions that I granted to plugins x, y, and z? They don't apply to www.myfavoritebank.example.com"

Is there a browser that has that feature yet? I spent a few hours trying to figure out if Firefox did. It did not appear to.

edit: Added semicolons to separate plugins in list b/c HN stripped the newlines from my comment.

>>emacdo+hQ
> Consent-O-Matic (auto fill cookie consent forms)

This will modify the browser fringerprint making you more unique.

I would not install so many extensions as you're trusting a huge number of organizations/people with privileged access to your browser. Anything that modifies CSS, Document Object Model (DOM) will make your browser stand out.

We wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.privacyguides.org/2021/12/01/firefox-privacy-20...

That includes any extensions that modify what is requested etc. See:

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions

See https://www.privacyguides.org/desktop-browsers/#firefox, you really don't need to do anything more than that.

> Facebook Container

etc, not needed unless you login to multiple Facebook accounts.

> Disconnect

Not needed, you should enable Firefox's ETP Enhanced Tracking Protection, this includes anything on that list. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

>>dngray+If1
I use Ad Nauseum instead of plain UBlock so that the data sent is just garbage. You would think something simple like clicking all the ads wouldn't work, but it works well enough that Google banned it from the Chrome store

>>Larrik+UJ1
I totally forgot about Ad Nauseam! I used to use it instead of uBlock Origin (which, if I remember correctly, is what Ad Nauseam actually uses for its adblocking). Google banning it from their extensions marketplace only strengthened my loathing for Google and my resolve to use it. I don’t remember why I eventually stopped - probably the inconvenience. Now that I’m a Firefox user, I should pick that back up and give it a spin again. It was entertaining to see the visualization of all the ads it had clicked on.

I also used to use Chaff (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chaff/jgjhamliocfh...), which opens up a tab and browses on its own when the browser is idle and disappears when you start using it again. As with Ad Nauseam, the means of protecting privacy behind it is not anonymity, but rather obfuscation - muddifying your actual browsing behavior by flooding the data you leave behind with junk data (at which point it ceases to be data, I suppose). The problem with that extension was that I would sit back and wait for it to start browsing, and then I’d waste too much time watching it / customizing its behavior.

The book _Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest_, written by the authors who developed Ad Nauseam and TrackMeNot, has a great chapter on chaff (the obfuscation tactic, not the Chaff extension mentioned above).