Tuesday, October 22, 2013

My Firefox browsing privacy settings

I decided to go for a bit more privacy for daily browsing. I don't think I need full security (I'm active in social networks anyway, so that would be the 1.st thing to cut), but let's say at least some. I've been influenced of the duckduckgo's donttrack.us and fixtracking.com pages.

I'm running Linux, so for the browser I have 2 mainstream options:
  • Chrome/Chromium
  • Firefox
The Chrome throws
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
at me (on both of my linux machines - Xubuntu/Fedora). Due to lack of motivation I didn't investigate any further (possibly some misbehaving extension). So my options narrow to Firefox only. But that is OK with me. As I'm used to it after some years of usage.

Firefox setup

I'm using duckduckgo.com as my default search engine in both
  • Location bar:
    • To set it, go to page:
      about:config 
      
      and set property:
      keyword.URL 
      
      to:
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=
      
    and
  • Search bar:
    • To set it click down arrow in the Search bar and choose "Manage Search Engines ..." where move DuckDuckGo to the very top
So I can escape from search + profile association promoting me next day all the stuff I searched for a couple days ago.

Add-ons

Moreover I go for the following add-ons:

Unsecure part

Well there are some specifics in my setup. As mentioned earlier I'm using social networks for posting, and as I'm lazy enough and like posting with minimal effort, I use also ShareThis. However since installing all the previously mentioned, ShareThis stopped working. Following are the tweaks I had to do to enable it again:
  • DoNoTrackMe - I clicked on toolbar icon and then options wheel in the corner, where I disabled "ShareThis" blocking,
  • moreover as Sharethis page rendered on sharing has problems with HTTPs certificate, I had to deactivate it in the - HTTPS Everywhere - as well.
  • Once I'm ready to share site and click Sharethis button in location bar (nothing happens so) I have to go for "Disconnect me" toolbar button and choose "Advertising" category and uncheck "Sharethis". I need to click Sharethis button once again then.
That's it for my setup. I don't think I improved my privacy in a radical way, but let's say I went for options that don't hurt my common browsing experience that much. Some (like ads blocking) make it even more pleasant.

1 comment:

Matt Ryan Tobin said...

Thank you for taking the time to write this post