uBlock Origin explicitly advises against this. If it’s the only content blocker it doesn’t currently have issues with YouTube, if you have multiple you’ll probably hit the “disable your adblocker” warning.
The first three are using identical techniques so combining them is of very limited benefit. They’re mostly there to cover software that doesn’t have an ad blocker.
I’d stick with just ublock origin.
Oh, I absolutely understand that a lot of tracking is stil possible. But in practice, it’s usually handled by third parties via a script loaded from a third party domain, because doing any of the smarter stuff would require a) a competent IT team b) the marketing team talking to them constantly.
Much easier to just slap another tracker into Google Tag Manager.
Of course this doesn’t help against tech companies. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit etc. will most likely track your views based on the requests, which you can’t avoid. But this takes care of 90% of the tracking, and most importantly, it removes the “everyone tracking you across every site you visit” aspect of the ad surveillance industry.
20% of their revenue comes from the EU, almost all of it from ads. I’d argue that complying with the law would cost them more than a quarter of the EU ads revenue, without affecting their costs much -> that’d be 5% of global revenue. Breaking the law still pays.
Also, how do you conclude that 448 million people paying 90 EUR per year, for a total of 40 billion EUR, wouldn’t offset a 4.66 billion USD fine?
If the fine was 4% of global revenue every month, sure. So far it looks like it’d be every 3-5 years though…
If you store them separately (or use U2F/WebAuthn/security keys), yes - it gives you some protection you if your password manager gets hacked.
If you just store them in the same password manager - no (except that some sites require it or create additional pains in the ass like forced e-mail based 2fa unless you have 2fa already).
The biggest problem is that it uploads your entire contact list and thus social network to Facebook. That alone tells them a lot about who you are, and crucially, also leaks this information about your friends (whether they use it or not).
With contacts disabled it’s a pain to use (last time I tried you couldn’t add people or see names, but you could still write to people after they contacted you if you didn’t mind them just showing up as a phone number).
It still collects metadata - who you text, when, from which WiFi - which reveals a lot. But if both you and your contact use it properly (backups disabled or e2e encrypted), your messaging content doesn’t get leaked by default. They could ship a malicious version and if someone reports your content it gets leaked, of course, but overall, still much better than e.g. telegram which collects all of the above data AND doesn’t have useful E2EE (you can enable it but few do, and the crypto is questionable).
If I installed a different app for every friend I had, I’d have a homescreen full just of chat apps. What’s worse, those niche privacy friendly apps go under or out of favor often.
You might be able to convince some of your friends to install an app just for you once, but by the time you’re telling them “this one now sucks, I’m on other app now” for the second time, they’ll just stop chatting with you, and if you ask them repeatedly, likely shun you even IRL because most people want to live their lives, not chase chat apps for their friends’ weird interests.
And even if they do that, they’ll have one app that they use every day, and one that sits in the bottom of their app drawer. Guess who gets invited to do something on the weekend, the person who shows up on their main contact list, or the person that would show up if they dug out that dusty app? And guess what the phone is gonna do with that app once it hasn’t been opened for a week… it’s going to deprioritize it so it won’t even work properly, while their main daily-opened app always gets push notifications immediately.
You don’t have to like it. You can pretend it’s not happening. But it will happen.
The only alternative that’s FOSS and not centrally controlled is Matrix. By being decentralized, anyone can run their own server and good luck stopping that.
There may be 200 other “alternatives”, but they’re irrelevant to the point where I consider then non-existent. Nobody has heard of them. Nobody is using them. Trying to push them on normal people will most likely result in them no longer talking to you as often or at all, and none of the other ones has any chance of reaching a critical mass. Matrix at least has some recognition among nerds and some, tiny amount of adoption outside.
Stop pushing random niche shit, it does privacy a disservice.
A messenger can at best be pseudonymous, since you want your friends to be able to find you.
And in practice, a mobile messenger that actually works (i.e. makes your phone go “ping” when someone sends you a message, not hours later) will always be traceable to you, as it needs to be able to deliver the message.
Also, regardless whether Signal is perfect or not, it’s the one privacy friendly messenger that people actually use. A messenger where you can reach only your privacy-extremist friends is useless. Signal is already on the extreme end for most people, trying to push anything “more perfect” (but more niche) will just make people use WhatsApp.
And the stuff you do want to use is often best installed from the Dev’s repo because fdroid takes forever to update theirs.
And last time I checked they still hadn’t implemented the now years old APIs that would let them to silently update apps, so unless the phone is rooted you need to click for every update…
No, the network effect is too strong. Deleting WhatsApp is cutting off the primary/only way to contact many friends (in countries where it’s the primary messenger), and a mild form of “abandon everything and go live in a monastery”.