Breaking Free Of Internet Tracking
Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2014 9:22 pm
For some time now, I've been on a casual mission to eliminate the data I inadvertently give to corporates. I thought I'd share my current style and see what others do, and what they think of my plan.
The extra benefit is that both google and facebook are heavy javascript/memory users, and by isolating them in this way, I can keep my main FF instance responsive and lean and easily kill/restart the bad boys without losing state and reloading hundreds of tabs.
Should you have more than one account of any single-sign-on type (google, facebook, github, and others) it's easy to spin up a new ff instance to use in parallel with them.
On top of this, I also run the flashblock plugin to prevent autonomous use of my audio and other resources, though the need for this is slowly fading and eventually I'll simply not run the flash plugin at all.
Thoughts? :-)
Fred.
- Firefox or Chromium, not Chrome, and definitely not IE. Chome tracks you, and IE just plain sucks (not on winblows anyway, but...).
- Firefox has CLI launch options "-p --no-remote", use these and decheck "use the selected profile at startup", then create two extra profiles over the default one
- In all three instances, select duckduckgo as the search engine
- In all three instances, install adblock plus and check disable tracking and remove social media buttons
- In all three instances, select about:blank and "show blank page" in homepage settings
- Use the Default profile for general browsing, searching, and reading.
- Use one new profile (aptly named) for gmail duties (planning to migrate away from this, but keep in mind it will cover youtube and G+ etc even when I stop using the email)
- Use the other new profile (also aptly named) for facebook, keep in mind that I have friends in many countries, and pages to manage, I can't really give this up, but I can manage how I use it.
The extra benefit is that both google and facebook are heavy javascript/memory users, and by isolating them in this way, I can keep my main FF instance responsive and lean and easily kill/restart the bad boys without losing state and reloading hundreds of tabs.
Should you have more than one account of any single-sign-on type (google, facebook, github, and others) it's easy to spin up a new ff instance to use in parallel with them.
On top of this, I also run the flashblock plugin to prevent autonomous use of my audio and other resources, though the need for this is slowly fading and eventually I'll simply not run the flash plugin at all.
Thoughts? :-)
Fred.