Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
view the rest of the comments
Isn't piling on browser extensions generally considered bad practice as it increases your attack surface (bad for security) and makes you more easy to fingerprint (bad for privacy)? This seems like a useful tool to use and then uninstall, but if you don't fully trust something then you shouldn't really be installing it at all!
I read this very often, but I'm not really sure if it's strictly true.
An addon only increases your attack surface if it processes data sent by the website, and it only makes you easier to fingerprint if it does something to the website or it's observable environment.
A few examples:
So my point is that there's a plenty of addons that don't need to do anything with the website itself to be useful, and even if it does something with it, it does not necessarily make you more fingerprintable.
That being said, it's also important to mention that an addon could do something you don't know about, so without asking others or yourself reading it's code (it's human readable, download the XPI file from the addon store and unzip it (it is a zip file actually)).
@smeg It seems like you miss the technical knowledge. Let me explain. Bad for security; this extension is so simply made there is basically nothing you could rly exploit and the only thing this extension is able to manage ur other extensions not more. Bad for privacy; it's not since not every extension can be fingerprinting, only extensions which modify or do things related to the site you access. Websites don't have by default access to the extensions you have installed.
Nothing is completely secure, I'd just rather not install an extension at all if I think it's dodgy rather than trust another third party to monitor it.
This article implies otherwise, apparently there are multiple different ways to detect installed extensions.
Recently there was a post about Dark Reader doing interesting things.
It's always good to be able to check whether your addons behave well.
The article says:
Firefox is not affected, and chrome is just being chrome. You should not expect privacy from a chrome browser.
@smeg You basically missread the article and it basically says, what I already mentioned and the extension is completly opensource I even checked the code myself. 🤦♂️
Lol, thanks but "trust me bro" doesn't count as a security audit