PC and android phone privacy

[Afasoas]

To all you folks saying stuff like:

Firefox add ons:
No script
U block origin
Disconnect
CookieMaster
Privacy Badger

Have you ANY idea how intrusive an add on can be? whatever the (considerable) risk is, you just multiplied it by 5.

Browser Plugins are the leading way to exploit end users right now. Essentially they can detect credit card details being typed into a web form.
I trust the authors of NoScript and PrivacyBadger and I consider those two plugins fairly essential. In fact it was disclosed to the EFF that the Privacy Badger plugin could make it easier to fingerprint website visitors, so they removed some of its functionality and fully diclosed what happened.

The other plugins I mentioned, well I run an intrusion prevention service on my network and that hasn't picked up anything dodgy. I'll often periodically do traffic captures and have a look through them.

CanvasBlocker is open source. The author seems legit. https://github.com/kkapsner/CanvasBlocker
As is User Agent Switcher: https://github.com/ray-lothian/UserAgent-Switcher/ ... I've actually had a look at the source code for this and it seems simple enough that I think even I'd spot anything nasty.

[Ham]

YOU may well understand (and it is clear that you do) but you are in a small percentage of users (and there's always the day-zero attacks on the publishers of the plugin).

As ever, it is a balance between convenience and risk, which sums up the overall thrust of this thread. People's perception of risk varies, I've sold my soul to Google because I feel at least I understand how they will resell it, and I'm happy with the bargain. Facebook, Instagram, Yahoo etc much less so, but my real world options are severely limited by the interactions with my online community.

[ian]

What the Hamster says, it's a balance. You can go all the way and yank out the network cable or smash the wifi box or you can decide the value of your data and what you get for it. There may be valid reasons certainly, but honestly, I don't much hugely care. I assume everything I do online is fair game. I'm familiar with big algorithms and know what they can do with a minimal set of datapoints.

But I don't much like FB, so I don't do it, despite the pestering. But that's the balance, I'm not interested enough to give them the data they've not already extracted from WhatsApp.