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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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A web browser extension for accessing I2P network anonymously (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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https://github.com/umutcamliyurt/I2Proxy

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Most firefox addons dont even have the permissions needed to change anything a website could observe.

Very strong disagree, I have seen and used many very widely used extensions that manipulate the DOM, which IMO satisfies your criteria of "something that can be observed" i.e. by javascript with a fingerprint tracker like creepjs.

Some examples:

ad blockers (uBO/uMatrix/etc.)
color/theme management (dark reader/dark theme/Stylish/etc.)
custom mouse cursor managers
page translators
addons serving in-browser ads
userscript managers (grease/tamper/violentmonkey etc.)
privacy blockers (CanvasBlocker/JShelter/etc.)
site-specific UI improvements (RES, SponsorBlock, youtube/SNS tweaks)

All of these can be detected and included as yet another bit of data that a unique fingerprint can be built from.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Yes, those could be detected.
Ill see how large that portion is on my system in a bit, but I would expect it to come out as the minority.

Non-detectible ones I can think of rn:

Tab muting manager
VPN manager
link redirect skippers
stats printers, like a tab counter
dynamic shortcuts, like opening the archived version of the current page on archive.org
old reddit redirect
cookie managers

Many more of the ones you listed won't be detectable on most websites.

userscript managers (grease/tamper/violentmonkey etc.)

A userscript manager is by definition detectible only on pages you define or install a userscript for. Even then, modern userscript managers like tampermonkey are running scripts in a separate scope that is completely sandboxed from the actual websites js context, you can't even pass an object or function to the website and access it there, it will fail.
Youtube has actively fought some userscripts and failed, which they probably wouldn't have if those userscripts were detectible.

User theme managers should be similar, but I can't comment on them as I don't use any.

page translators

Translators are only detectible when enabled.

addons serving in-browser ads

Why would you have an addon that serves ads?

site-specific UI improvements (RES, SponsorBlock, youtube/SNS tweaks)

Are site-specific, i.e. not detectible anywhere else

privacy blockers (CanvasBlocker/JShelter/etc.)

Please don't use those anymore, use only uBo. Same for uMatrix.
uBo is pretty good about not being detected, for obvious reasons.