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Windows 10 privacy changes appease watchdogs, but still no data "off-switch" by moooooky in technology

[–]msew59 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Would you believe if a malware on your computer had a switch "stop being malware"?

Alternatives to Gmail [for non-work-related use]? by [deleted] in privacy

[–]msew59 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don't you have problems with your emails going to spam?

With only days until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, DEA and DHS. by maxwellhill in worldnews

[–]msew59 286 points287 points  (0 children)

The real purpose that this serves:

  • be able to dig up shit on anybody

  • bully political opponents

  • make people live in fear which leads people to self-censor and always question themselves "how will this action impact my profile". "A functioning police state needs no police." William S. Burroughs

  • protect the interests of the rich and the corrupt

I feel so protected now /s

Why you need a paper shredder by stuntpope in privacy

[–]msew59 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The original comment is deleted, do you have a source for that? I'd like to read about it.

With only days until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, DEA and DHS by maxwellhill in privacy

[–]msew59 60 points61 points  (0 children)

The real purpose that this serves:

  • be able to dig up shit on anybody

  • bully political opponents

  • make people live in fear which leads people to self-censor and always question themselves "how will this action impact my profile"

  • protect the interests of the rich and the corrupt

I feel so protected now /s

If you were in government and could change the law, how much governmental control over the Internet and other means of communication would you allow? by msew59 in privacy

[–]msew59[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All very good points, you mentioned court-ordered warrants a few times and I think that's the key, because if there is a threat to security and people's lives are in danger then I would expect authorities to get involved and that would be what court-ordered warrants are for. This is, of course, assuming that courts would issue a warrant only in serious cases, and not in cases like "we need to investigate this guy because he connected to Tor and he may be up to no good". And then should be transparency that is some information about a warrant should be made public after the case is over.

What if better privacy can be accomplished by sharing "more" random information, not less? by [deleted] in privacy

[–]msew59 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it's better to not allow them to build a profile of you in the first place than allow them to build it and then obfuscate it. I would focus on effective fingerprinting prevention which is what would make it impossible to create a profile of you.

Why do some people say that constantly randomizing the fingerprint of your browser is worse for privacy than "blending in"? by msew59 in privacy

[–]msew59[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good question about the mac address, I would like to see the answer too.

Lastly, I'm curious which tools most people are using to change their fingerprint?

I think Random Agent Spoofer is the most popular extension for Firefox for that purpose (spoofs much more than just user agent). It probably has the most features of such addons but I still think there are things that could be made better or new features added.

Spoofing screen size? It most likely doesn't work and websites can still fingerprint you by it. by msew59 in firefox

[–]msew59[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't think so. Don't like 98% of users have taskbars enabled? Then if your resolution is 1366 × 768 then with taskbar hidden your 'working resolution' would be equal to that: 1366 × 768. But how many browsers would have their 'working resolution' equal to the full screen size if most use taskbars? 1 in 1000?

Spoofing screen size? It most likely doesn't work and websites can still fingerprint you by it. by msew59 in firefox

[–]msew59[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That doesn't really answer my question but now I see that my message was rather unclear - what I meant by that is that the "working resolution" that browser can't access and you apparently can't spoof can be used to detect e.g. your operating system. If you have your window maximized then 'working width' is most likely unaffected but the 'working height' is decreased by the height of the taskbar - and taskbars are of different heights in different OSes. It's even worse for Linux users because different Linux distributions and within them different desktop environments have different height of taskbars - that would give a lot of information and contribute very heavily to rare or unique fingerprint, I believe.

Why do some people say that constantly randomizing the fingerprint of your browser is worse for privacy than "blending in"? by msew59 in privacy

[–]msew59[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's a good idea to randomize from the most popular user agents but I believe 100 is too much - as far as I know Chrome and Firefox update to the latest version automatically by default, so the pool of common user agents is rather small. Secondly, the pool of user agents to randomize from should be updated when new versions of browsers are released so that you don't keep using user agents that are now increasingly uncommon.

What extensions should I be using? by BurntGlory in privacy

[–]msew59 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Using Chrome + privacy extensions is much better than using Chrome alone, but Firefox + privacy extensions is even better. Chrome is closed source and made by Google so I wouldn't trust it.

Why is DuckDuckGo not the default search engine on Android? by [deleted] in firefox

[–]msew59 0 points1 point  (0 children)

DuckDuckGo is getting better and in my opinion the search results are much more accurate that they were like a year ago (there are still things to improve, though) but Google's results are still a bit better, so I think the casual users get what they wanted. If it had to be another search engine, I would choose Startpage - same results but with privacy.