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Why is this episode of NOVA about data privacy recommending Privacy Badger? (www.pbs.org)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was under the impression that Privacy Badger wasn't considered useful any more . . . ? They should've just recommended using Firefox instead, yes?

EDIT: They spoke to, but IMHO, did not give enough time to, Cory Doctorow and Brewster Kahle. They mentioned Mastodon 👍, and described the Fediverse while not actually calling it that! A bit frustrating.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I saw a GitHub repo that explained add-ons that are "useless" and add more finger printing. The biggest reason of them being useless was generally the fact unlock origin already has the feature too.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is the GitHub repo wiki you are referring to, hopefully helps others declutter their extensions.

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Nice! Stared it this time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This is factually wrong; as installed plugins aren't accessible to just any webpage...and plugins actually exist that obscure this anyways.

Not to mention there's more hardened forks of modern browsers that don't share plugin information anyways.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

That's not just how fingerprinting works. Any setting on your browser that is not default and any addon makes your browser setup more unique. From my understanding they don't need to access your plugin listing or request settings because they can also do it based off of how the browser behaves. If you disable JavaScript entirely I suppose you wouldn't have this issue though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Why would librewolf specifically advise that you minimize your extensions to decrease client uniqueness if it had no effect on client uniqueness? Someone's misinformed, and I don't think its librewolf.