A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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I still use uMatrix to block javascript and other shit by default, then enable as needed.
there’s an unfortunate tension between privacy and anonymity (and usability): the more you change about your behavior and system to preserve privacy, the more you stand out as a unique individual.
Multi-tiered threat modeling is a good way to find the best of as many worlds as you can tolerate. Maybe you use tor browser for anything it doesn’t hopelessly break. Use hardened firefox for other things. Vanilla firefox profile for when a site doesn’t work for whatever reason. Chromium when necessary. By dynamically shifting between security levels as your threat model necessitates, you can maintain usability while preserving some amount of privacy. The downside is time and effort, but baby steps are fine. Switch out corporate apps and services with open source ones over time. There’s decent-to-great alternatives for most things microsoft/google
Obviously. Device fingerprinting is much, much more advanced than that. IP, device screen resolution and type, etc. And that’s just the basics
And people dont share devices?
I have a family pc in the living room. We all use it.
Im not on facebook though.
There’s got to be more metadata involved in fingerprinting. The type of content you’re looking at. Maybe even deriving some sort of signature from your mouse movements.
LOL
Google knows who you are based on your browser window size. You can’t escape shit from these guys.
Is that why Tor Browser has those edges?
Exactly. Makes fingerprinting more difficult. If everyone has the same windows size you can’t make out who’s who based just on that
Fullscreen 1080p
Whos this john? He has a billion pcs!
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Firefox has containers that allows you to seperate all websites in categories where they can’t reach anything outside of it.
There’s a special one for Facebook
Canvas, webgl, audio fingerprinting and others I think are still effective through the container.
There are still…I dunno…probably DNS hops, IP, time’s of day, browser window size, browser user agent…
And if you access any page with any similar parameters on your phone or another household device on any site with FB tracking, it’s over.
It looks like in the last 7 days my phone has cutoff over 150,000 different tracking attempts and that’s just catchable ones and on my phone.
just don’t use the bullshit in the first place
Its not that simple. They are literally everywhere
it is pretty simple actually there’s a lot of tools to block and ignore these companies in a lot of ways. you can also choose to not use any other products which is a very simple thing to do as well
I don’t use Facebook but I’m 100% sure they have my data.
A lot of apps that uses Facebook login, debugger, React Native, etc. allows it to collect as much user data as it can and send it to FB servers because that’s the default.
I’m pretty sure React/React Native doesn’t have any Facebook tracking built in. The dev community would crucify them for that.
I would highly doubt that. They don’t care, most of them not just willingly but intentionally insert google tracking code and similar.
There are definitely a lot of developers that are like that, but you also have the open source junkies. The latter group would go absolutely bananas.
I dont have facebook, and I explicitly tell family not to put my pictures on their facebook pages or mention me at all.
I’m still 100% convinced facebook has my biometric data, my home address, and what I ate for dinner last week.
The amount of data they collect is insane, and intrusive.
Every time it comes up, i’m reminded of a sex worker who was doxed by facebook because she in a parking lot that a former client was in, and it had used proximity data and shit to link her Sex Work Phone/Facebook Account, to her real Phone/Facebook account, which was then given to the client as a suggested contact.
Facebook takes biometric data from pictures that aren’t uploaded to the platform. All it takes is for them to have access to the filesystem of the user’s mobile OS.
This is why I fullstop do not let people take photos of me where I can help it. I’m fucking tired of being made a datapoint.
There’s a lo of information that sites, not only Facebook, use to track you. Email address can be one this. Anyway, I consider that using anonymous email address is a good idea not only to avoid tracking, also for security reasons I case of filtering, for instance.
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Using a VPN does exactly nothing against cookies or device fingerprinting.
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But the VPN company still has your data
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There is no such thing as a “good VPN provider”. VPNs were not created for privacy. They exist to allow individual users and groups to network together in enterprise environments
If you want more security use i2p or tor
I am using Firefox, and with a shit-load of add-ons that supposedly prevent unwanted cookies and fingerprinting. I use a VPN.
I was permanently banned from Reddit (for advocating firebombing nazis, as if that’s a bad thing). When I logged in to an alternate account, that account was also permanently banned. Any account I tried to create after that point ended up being banned within a week, regardless of whether or not I was using it. I checked online. Apparently this has become fairly common in the last 2-3 years.
While you can minimize your digital fingerprint, it’s almost impossible to prevent all digital fingerprinting. The EFF says that I have very strong protection against digital fingerprinting, but I’m still identifiable to a company with sufficient resources to devote to the task.
All you have to do to avoid reddit perma bans is to log in on a browser without cookies, on a VPN, and that’s it. If you’re still getting permabanned instantly on new accounts you’re doing something wrong. Maybe you’re using a VPN address that has been banned, idk. I ban evaded multiple accounts for years and only stopped because after I moved my IP changed and I don’t need to fuck with the VPN anymore
The main thing is you’ll be shadowbanned probably and you’ll have to fuck around with getting karma and begging the admins to un-shadow ban you if your posts don’t show up
I’ve been using a VPN for several years. I’ve tried using every major browser except Mulvad and Librewolf. As far as I can tell, they’re doing some form of digital fingerprinting that I can’t block. My only option would be getting an entirely new computer. I went through and overwrote/deleted 15 years of comment history (but have not deleted accounts), it’s just not worth it to me.
Did you log in from mobile, too?
Meta applies a myriad of advanced and complicated tracking methods. Email is a very popular and easy one. I believe the one you’re referring to is called a tracking pixel.
For example, some browsers block tracking Pixels, but if you’re logged into Amazon with an email address that Meta knows, they will sell your shopping habits to Meta to show you ads.
Who gives a flying fuck, why are you people still using that trash failbook!
they got one hell of a marketplace
While browser containers won’t work since you’re using the same IP anyway, blocking the trackers themselves would be more effective. DNS blocking, uBlock, and Privacy Badger can help block fb trackers on websites. So fb knows your ip, but at least they can’t track you across other sites.
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This is a very harsh response. If possible, please try to be kinder.
Why would he want to be German children?
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yep this is why i use containers on firefox.
And FF containers are still no match for advanced fingerprinting.
The only way to protect against advanced fingerprinting is to use the TOR Browser or Mullvad Browser, to blend in with everyone else who shares the exact same fingerprint using those tools. The best you can do outside of those is to protect against less advanced scripts.
that is much more complex for normal people but yeah. tor can be slow as shit especially.
Tor is also not recommended for streaming since the p2p connection bypasses the Tor network
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Does Firefox containers hide your IP, device info and location?
you can use firefox containers with container proxy to have different ips on each container. that said i run wireguard on my router itself so all the devices are behind vpn.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-proxy/
as for location, changing ip also changes your geolocation. there is also the location reported by your browser which you can change in about:config but this isn’t provided unless you give permission to the site asking it.
as for device info, each container is like having a separate firefox install. all the cookies are separated and isolated.