Privacy

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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.

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My experiences with Pi-hole (scribe.disroot.org)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by duikbrilletje@scribe.disroot.org to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Pi-hole has helped improve my "relationship" with Firefox, or better phrased with Firefox forks like LibreWolf and Tor browser. Cool thing with Pi-hole is that you can watch the query log and see what happened in the background while you were surfing the Internet. I learned that :

After removing the sponsored shortcuts in Firefox and putting your own shortcuts there Firefox will make connections each time you start the browser. So, if you would have icons on your quick start page in Firefox for let's say EFF, Lemmy, Mastodon, HackerNews, with each Firefox start up, it would query these sites. which I didn't like so much. Since then I've gone back to a complete blank start page, removing search and all those quick start icons, using just toolbar folders with bookmarks.
Pi-hole defaults to blocking telemetry for Firefox and Thunderbird.
Signal uses Google servers I saw via Pi-hole. I thought that they were using Amazon servers, but looking at Wikipedia for the history of Signal hosting I learned that Signal went back to Google for hosting.
Firefox push notification services are hosted on Google servers. LibreWolf removes a lot of Google things that Firefox has by default, but not the push parts. With Pi-hole it is very easy to block that.

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[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The new tab page is not from 99, however. And even for generic favicon handling my experience in case if bookmarks is that the bookmark won't have the favicon of the website if it couldn't obtain in in the moment the bookmark was created. So no, it does not seem to be an issue with the favicon system itself, but rather the new tab page.

[–] bloodfart@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’m almost 100% that if sponsored links are enabled then new tab page calls mozilla or whoever to figure out what they are and then resolves the sponsored link pages to pull their favicon.

I’ll verify when I get home and have control over both the computer and the gateway, but it really doesn’t seem malicious or dangerous to me…

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah, it really depends on where those requests go to. If they go to mozilla, that's not that much of a problem, because for addon updates and profile sync it is happening anyways. But if they go to the websites themselves, now that is a problem.

It may be easier for you to test it using the browser toolbox. It's diagnostic tools are not limited to a single tab, but it shows everything of the browser.