Why is this episode of NOVA about data privacy recommending Privacy Badger? (www.pbs.org)
from hedge@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 08:21
https://beehaw.org/post/13832782

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.

#technology

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bbbhltz@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 08:27 next collapse

Maybe just bad research. I haven’t tried, but I’m sure if you search for “how to protect yourself online” some of the SEO manipulating websites show up in the first results.

hedge@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 08:29 collapse

Well, they spoke with the EFF which made Privacy Badger, so maybe that’s why. They did the password thing with the dice, tho, which I guess is good.

bbbhltz@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 17:35 collapse

Ok. Makes sense. The video is geoblocked for me so I probably should’ve kept my mouth shut

kath@kbin.social on 18 May 2024 00:13 collapse

pbs.org is yt-dlp compatible

hedge@beehaw.org on 19 May 2024 11:38 collapse

That’s good to know, thanks!

seang96@spgrn.com on 16 May 2024 10:52 next collapse

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.

Melody@lemmy.one on 16 May 2024 11:46 next collapse

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.

seang96@spgrn.com on 16 May 2024 12:07 next collapse

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.

Umbrias@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 23:25 collapse

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.

Frostcoins@lemmy.ml on 16 May 2024 12:45 collapse

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

github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-…

seang96@spgrn.com on 16 May 2024 12:51 collapse

Nice! Stared it this time.

MonkderDritte@feddit.de on 16 May 2024 12:37 next collapse

Wasn’t privacy badger the addon owned by a suspicious company? And telemetry or something?

scytale@lemm.ee on 16 May 2024 13:07 collapse

It’s owned by EFF, which AFAIK is still a trusted org. You might be thinking of Adblock Plus or Ghostery.

MonkderDritte@feddit.de on 16 May 2024 13:08 collapse

Right , Ghostery, my bad.

vox@sopuli.xyz on 16 May 2024 13:44 next collapse

the only reason I’m still using Privacy Badger is the feature that hides embeeded iframe widgets until a “view” button is clicked (for example, embeeded tweets etc)

Hirom@beehaw.org on 16 May 2024 14:52 next collapse

Ghostery, Disconnect, Privacy Badger, etc

Privacy Badger does more than dFPI. dFPI just isolate cookies. Privacy Badger blocks cookies. And completely block connection to some hosts that are dedicated to tracking, which prevent other forms of tracking that aren’t cookie-based.

bbbhltz@beehaw.org on 17 May 2024 14:25 collapse

If you are geoblocked you can stream it with …pbs-video.pbs.org/…/nova5107-AABR-AVC_793.m3u8 with mpv

See also: this thread on Mastodon octodon.social/@cwebber/112451933593063510