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Browsers Which Protect Your Privacy?

Posted by Cliff on from the limiting-your-exposure dept.

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?"

3 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. I use... by doofsmack · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. A filtering proxy ususally beats inbuilt features by SteWhite · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Cookies by valkraider · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can save this as an XML file, and then import it into IE6's privacy settings.

    <MSIEPrivacy>
    <MSIEPrivacySetting s formatVersion="6">
    <p3pCookiePolicy zone="internet">
    <firstParty noPolicyDefault="forceSession" noRuleDefault="forceSession" alwaysAllowSession="no">
    </firstParty>
    <thirdPar ty noPolicyDefault="reject" noRuleDefault="reject" alwaysAllowSession="no">
    </thirdParty>
    </p3pCook iePolicy>
    <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).