Quick and dirty guide to Firefox privacy

If this post catched your attention is because, probably, you are a bit as paranoid as me.  Don't misunderstand the word paranoid, nowadays most of your online activity can be, and it's being, tracked by quite a lot of companies that make a profit from it.  It's clear that the level of protection you can achieve depends on what is called the threat model.  Is not the same hiding from those nasty three-letter-agencies than hiding from your ISP, your boss or your wife/husband, that can be secretly sniffing your internet traffic through your router.

So, threat-model angostically, I just want to share few addons and settings that I'm using to browse and do other online activities with a little more peace of mind.  The first choice, of course, and ignoring the OS, is what browser you use.  In my case, I use Firefox, the regular release, not the nightly or other experiments.

Firefox has improved a lot during the last year, from being a bit slower than Chrome to almost beating it in speed and memory consumption.  And it's graphically attractive, the UI is lean and clear.  Although the best part of Firefox is not its performance or memory consumption, but the fact that is an open source browser and not owned by any evil company like Google or Microsoft, and has a lot, like a lot, of addons to do anything you can imagine.

Focusing on privacy and security, this is the list of addons I use on a daily basis.

• uBlock origin.  It's an "ad blocker" that does much more than blocking ads, it's in fact a general purpose blocker that, under a set of rules, prevents your browser from loading scripts, images, saving cookies and blocking frames.  It comes with a comprehensive set of rules and can be switchet from normal to advanced mode, giving you more control to see what it's doing under the hood.
• HTTPS everywhere. Forces any website to switch to HTTPS when possible.  It adds an extra layer of security, for example warning when a site is loading non-encrypted content.
• Firefox multi-account containers.  This is a new feature implemented in Firefox Quantum, where there is a possility to isolate every tab from each other, in terms of cookies and scripts.  For example, you can open two different gmail tabs in different containers and login to two accounts.  I use it to isolate google from facebook from other sites.
• Decentraleyes.  This small extension creates a local repository of third-party assets like fonts, scripts or whatever.  It prevents firefox from connecting to CDNs that may be tracking you and speeds up your browsing a bit.
• Privacy possum.  It's like privacy badger, but on steroids, according to the developer.  While PB tries to discriminate non-tracking from tracking websites, PP directly blocks third party cookies and in my experience, pages don't break.
• DuckDuckGo privacy essentials.  It's a small extension that sometimes complement the others by catching trackers that bypassed our invulnerable firewall.  It does not harm.
• Cookie Autodelete.  It's an extension that, as its name suggests, deletes third or first-party cookies according to your rules and works in containers as well.

Besides those security and privady addons, I'm using Bitwarden, a free an open source password manager that works with the usual centralized database model.

With these addons, and using a VPN, you can torrent and browse with relative privacy.  Of course, if you don't use containers and don't delete your cookies while browsing facebook, they will be able to track your online behaviour to serve you better ads, but it's for your own good.

Another interesting topic to consider is the services you actually use.  I'm trying to de-google myself, by using alternatives to the search engine, mail, videos and even apps in android, although this last part is the most difficult one.

For search engines, there are some interesting alternatives:

• Startpage, serves anonymized google results.
• DuckDuckGo, an US-based search engine that promises not to track you.  Their results are good enough.
• Qwant, an european browser with nice design and good results.
• Searx.me, a metasearch engine that gets its results from other engines.  You can self-host your own instance and it's extremely configurable, although in my opinion the design is a bit dull.

Of course, there are a bunch of search engines out there, but most of then aren't privacy friendly or with bad results, so I'm sticking with them.  In fact, if you switch engines you're less likely to be tracked by any of them.  And google, of course, apart from keeping a history of your searches and building a profile of you, puts you in a "search bubble" according to your interests, and preventing from finding results that they consider you're not interested in.

Some more alternatives.  For youtube, I use either Dtube or Hooktube.  The first one is based on the steem blockchain and, since it's very recent, lacks content.  Hooktube is a website that only serves you the video stream from Youtube without loading any script or cookies.  Not all videos work, it fails with some specific music videos, but it's a 99% functional substitute to YT.

And that's all that I can think of from now, I hope you enjoyed the post or at least found it informative.