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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Very simple way to improve your privacy and security massively. (self.privacy)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by ModerateImprovement to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I highly recommend disabling JavaScript by default in your browser and then whitelisting the websites that you use frequently and need JavaScript to function.

The privacy benefit of this is that when you read articles online or visit new websites, most of the time it will not need JavaScript to function which will stop loading a lot of ads and tracking scripts.

The security benefit here is massive, first if you visited a bad link that contains a malware that is dependent on JavaScript it would not work, secondly if you visited a link for a service that you use and JavaScript did not work there, then you can see in real time that this is a fake page and not the real websitewebsite you intended to visit.

Bonus tip: try to replace the unnecessary websites that can't work without JavaScript and you need by JavaScript free websites or open source apps.

Disclaimer: Stay cautious. This recommendation will improve your privacy and security, but it does not protect you from everything.

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 2 months ago (6 children)

15-20 years ago, I'd have agreed with you. But apart from a select few news sites and exceedingly rare static sites, what percentage of websites most users use day to day actually function even minimally without JavaScript?

I'm convinced that in practice, most users would be conditioned to whitelist pretty much every site they visit due to all the breakage. Still a privacy and security improvement, but a massive one? I'm not sure.

Very happy to be convinced otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago

Yep, software dev here for a static marketing site for a product. We are in a constant battle with PMs and SEO who want Google tracking, Facebook, TikTok, A/B testing, cursor tracking, etc. We're trying to keep page-speeds fast while loading megabytes of external JS code...

Luckily all that can be blocked by the end user without affecting the site though, all you'd lose is some carousels and accordions etc that are done with a few lines of code.

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