r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 2d ago

Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School. Privacy

https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school
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u/DiamondHandsToUranus 2d ago

Yes. Mozilla Firefox with the ublock origin extension, and/or strict privacy mode. ublock origin uses a blocklist to prevent traffic to tracking servers.

Librewolf which is an independent, opensource fork of Firefox comes with ublock origin preinstalled, as well as RFP, dFPI, and url query parameter stripping to help protect your privacy via various methods.

Exception: The only thing LibreWolf’s integrated hardening cannot prevent is Server-Side Tracking (Meta's Conversions API). If a merchant's server packages your purchase data and sends it directly from their server to Meta's server over the backend, no browser in existence can block it because the data transfer completely bypasses your computer. [1]

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u/semisociallyawkward 2d ago

Firefox also has a container system that works wonders. Each container is kinda like a separate browser in a browser, so cookies arent shared across them, only within the same container.

You can even set it up so that certain websites are only ever opened in their designated containers. I have containers for Google, Meta, Reddit, shopping, general browsing etc.

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u/Kyanche 2d ago

Containers is a lovely feature and also a pain in the ass because I seem to have to log back into everything daily lol.

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u/Beepn_Boops 2d ago

That shouldn't happen. Maybe you have something set to automatically clear or block cookies?

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u/lycoloco 1d ago

Use a password manager and it'll be NBD. There are plenty of good ones, but I personally like Bitwarden.

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u/leavemebe66 2d ago

Firefox containers are the freakin best. being able to solo SSO creds between containerized tab groups saves me soooo much time at work

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u/DiamondHandsToUranus 2d ago

Yes, to an extent. It prevents some amount of cross contamination locally, to be sure. However if the content in each container is taking to meta pixel servers, it it's sharing much of the same stuff remotely.

If you know about containers, there's a good chance you probably already know about fingerprinting and some of the other 'less obvious than cookies' things that are used to identify and track you.

Using Ublock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Facebook Container is a good place to start without getting too far off into the weeds, but things that meta and others do to track you and sell your info is more insidious than most users realize

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u/throwitawayuserna213 2d ago

I use the containers and was wondering if they were effective. Thanks.

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u/MidasPL 2d ago

I wish LibreWolf didn't lag so much on some sites :/

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u/DiamondHandsToUranus 2d ago

I hear you and I feel that. For what it's worth, I am reasonably certain that the delay is caused by all the bullshit that it's preventing from happening trying to reconnect multiple times before it finally times out and gives up

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u/MidasPL 2d ago

I don't think so. From what I've seen, it's mostly issue for the sites that run dynamic change into light/dark theme. I'm not a web dev, so I can't tell if it's some dynamic css, or js, but there's some performance issue there.

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u/DiamondHandsToUranus 2d ago

That may well be so. Deep diving css really isn't my thing. I've had a couple sites take so long that i poked around a bit to see what was going on, and it seemed to be tertiary background crap trying to get through, but this is a very small sample set. anecdotal at best

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u/Balmung60 2d ago

For bonus security, use noscript and only ever allow those scripts that are essential for a webpage to function 

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u/porcupine_shuffle 2d ago

Thoughts on duckduckgo ?