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Browsers Which Protect Your Privacy?
valkraider asks: "Browsers are getting better at protecting user's privacy. Mozilla has pretty good cookie preferences. Many browsers like OmniWeb for Mac OS X will block images from sites based on wildcard expressions (like *ad*). Most browsers have settings to delete cookies and cache and such at the end of each session. Even IE for windows (not Mac) will allow you to 'import' a privacy file and control many things pretty tightly. Currently on PCs I use Mozilla with no disk cache, no persistent cookies, no third party images,and many blocked image sites. I can do almost the same with Chimera on Mac OS X. What are people's favorite browsers for protecting your privacy?" Which browsers provide the best balance between functionality and privacy? What privacy features would you like to see, that are missing from those currently available?"
Opera and proxomitron. It allows me to filter out flash like everyone's complaining about, and you can set rules for just about everything sent and recieved. Very nice.
Opera! It's got a wide array of privacy features. You can not only turn off cookies, images, GIF animation, and all that, but you can do it on the fly by pressing the F12 key. Also, you can choose not to send reffer information along to the site, if you don't want them to know where you came from. One more thing, you can choose to identify as Opera, MSIE, and from 3 different versions of Mozilla. And that's just in the 6.x version, the 7 beta is now availible for download from opera.com!
I use this with both IE and Mozilla. I have Mozilla ask before accepting cookies, so I've added a bunch of usage tracking sites to my proxy script.
You can find a sample of how to do this at a friend's site: no-ads
Mozilla does support regexp-based filtering through Automatic Proxy Configuration. See http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/ for information on how to do this. (It's not what the feature was designed for, but it works perfectly.)
I use Privoxy (get if from SourceForge).
It's a filtering HTTP proxy, incredibly configurable, and of course browser and platform independant. The "out of the box" config also does a really good job (IMHO) of filtering without being too intrusive.
Features include:
Filtering images, flash and java applets
Cookie management including transforming permanent cookies to session based cookies.
Pop-up window killing
Filtering of any URL pattern with regular expressions
.... plus much more. Really, to much to list. Try it.
I find that privoxy works better for me than the mechanisms built in to any browser. It's based on the old junkbusters codebase with many more features. It's available for both windows and very nearly any form of UNIX (or UNIX-like) OS you might reasonably use to browse the net. (Of course, I have it set to allow ads for slashdot :-)) In combination with phoenix's popup blocking (which takes care of SSL sites such as hushmail that privoxy can't) I find that it gives me near-perfect control over my browsing experience.
That said, if I really suspect that a particular site may be malicious, as opposed to simply obnoxious, I look it over in lynx first.
.sig: file not found
The way I prevent flash ads is by adding a line to my /etc/hosts file that looks like this:
192.168.0.3 ad.doubleclick.net
This makes my browser look for the flash file (or any other ad.doubleclick.net url) on my own box, thereby breaking the the ad and preventing the cookies.
--I second the nomination of the iCab browser as being just "good" overall. Wicked fast (in my purely anecdotal tests the fastest GUI browser I have ever used), small download, installs easily, updates easily, basically "just works" really well, plus all the features. Cookie control is outstanding and there are a lot more speedy menu choices available directly from the browser rather than opening a preferences dialog window separately, images load and not load, select just one image on a page, etc.. I've only used it on Mac classic, but tell ya what, it allowed me to listen to mp3 streaming audio plus browsing when nothing else would on my semi ancient 1400 powerbook, and runs on a real old one almost as well, an old 280c I setup for my girlfriend, that only has a moto 68k processor in it at I *think* 25 mghz.. I actually wish that it was ported to linux as well, I'd use it if it was the same functionality it has in mac over, say, mozilla.
You can save this as an XML file, and then import it into IE6's privacy settings.
r ty noPolicyDefault="reject" noRuleDefault="reject" alwaysAllowSession="no">k iePolicy>>
<MSIEPrivacy>
<MSIEPrivacySetting s formatVersion="6">
<p3pCookiePolicy zone="internet">
<firstParty noPolicyDefault="forceSession" noRuleDefault="forceSession" alwaysAllowSession="no">
</firstParty>
<thirdPa
</thirdParty>
</p3pCoo
<flushCookies/>
</MSIEPrivacySettings
</MSIEPrivacy>
*NOTE* The submit process is adding some spaces..
Line 2: remove space in MSIEPrivacySettings
Line 6: remove space in thirdParty
Line 8: remove space in p3pCookiePolicy
These custom settings force ALL cookies to session lifetime, and does not allow 3rd party cookies. It will flush all your existing cookies when you import it. (you can remove the flush cookies element to not flush them on import).
if you check the src of many ad images they are sometimes referencing a script (htm, asp, cgi, pl, etc) instead of the actual image (gif, jpg, png, etc). this script grabs all kind of parameters through javascript from the user, then forwards to an image so that all the user sees is an image. i guess some people consider this a violation of privacy.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Really its only a few websites which do the majority of the ads, so not that many sites actually need to be blocked. Anything that makes it through my HOSTS file is usualy on a site that I enjoy (ie. Slashdot) and so I'm not bothered by the ads. One drawback could be that you see an annoying message where the image is supposed to be, however there is software to change that as well.
The hosts file I use can be found here: Kazaa Lite Webpage, you'll have to click on the "supertrick" button on the left, since I'm too lazy to figure how to directly link.
In Mozilla you can block or unblock cookies on a per-site basis using Tools->Cookie Manger->Block Cookies from this Site and Tools->Cookie Manger->Unblock Cookies from this Site.
I suspect you could achieve what you want in Mozilla by setting the default policy to blocking cookies, and then visiting the sites where you want to allow cookies and using the Unblock Cookies from this Site option to enable cookies for just those sites.
Those choices are stored persistently in cookperm.txt in the mozilla directory, so you could possibly even edit that file manually providing you carefully followed the format of existing entries.
Ewen
Um, you've now got a lot more to worry about than clearing your cache. I'm not sure why Slashdot hasn't covered this, since the events of the last two days were such a big deal when it comes to privacy.
In any event, Ashcroft and Poindexter just got authorized by a secret court to feed their $200 million Total Information Awareness system that is part of the Homeland Security Act all the data they can eat. What that means to the average Slashdot reader is that come this time next year, if someone in the FBI, for whatever reason, wants a list of IP addresses who visited slashdot.org from Jun 2003 to Sep 2003, who viewed any posts containing references to Public Key Cryptography or Afghanistan, and then given that list wants to see all search terms that they have entered at www.google.com during the same period, they can have it.
Again I say: You've got a lot more to worry about than the contents of your cache. None of us are above suspicion.