this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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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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Browser extensions aren’t the answer to preventing tracking (as apps and other processes outside the browser aren’t blocked)
some DNS providers help with that, though I get what you mean
I use primarily DNS blocking myself, but it’s a custom solution that pulls in a ton of blocklists. I get tired of the “just use a browser extension” as the solution for everything, and any time I bring up IP/DNS-based solutions people say “but that doesn’t block everything” as if browser extensions do.
The biggest scam is with Browser VPN, they are simply proxies, good to watch country restricted movies but not for more. They don't protect privacy, because they only can create the tunnel, after the browser is already connected to your ISP server. Bad in countries with dictatorship or teocracies with controlled servers, there only steganographic methods can help in comunications (Hidden messages in Photos, music, or even innocent text files)
But normally 100% privacy isn't possible, almost every actuation online can be tracked. You can only avoid the worst with your shitty PC against the server and AI power of big companies, goverments and secret services with their hacker squads. Tey can spy other goverments, they are swallowing this little geeks with their laptop and VPN in a breaktime if needed (China even employ savants (isle gifted autistic people) as hackers in their secret services)
Hard agree, except I do have an issue with the last paragraph in that I think it’s far dumber than you’ve described.
Simply blocking (a shit ton of) domains can really get you 99% of the way there. I’m a web developer and it’s stupid dumb how third-party stuff is hosted. It’s either exactly that (third party hosted) or a CNAME or a third party which is easily blocked.
Look, I know how complex tracking and fingerprinting can be. But from my experience, it’s really not hard to block. Of course, I’m not really speaking to first party tracking where blocking would destroy the entire experience. But for the most part, you can prevent a profile being built about you (at least for tracking and advertising) by blocking with DNS.
Problem is first party tracking. Blocking is just against third parties. For first party tracking you are just going to have to use tor browser.
Yeah I go through multiple VPN providers for this.
I use DNScrypt and Quad9 DNS
I’m using Quad9 as the upstream resolver too with TLS DNS. But before sending off my query I check my blocklist to return
NXDOMAINfor tracking/advertising domains (I prefer doing that to using0.0.0.0as is common, it also blocksHTTPSqueries which is nice.