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stux⚡

It really doesn’t do much for privacy

25 comments
DELETED

@stux anyone who uses chrome doesn't care about their security.

john lehet

@stux Simply having installed Chrome on your computer without thoroughly uninstalling all the embedded bits of it means you don’t have full privacy. Even after you delete the application, there are bits phoning home to google every day. You can be sure google is using every ping it can to fingerprint and track you.

afrangry

@johnlehet @stux that's very alarming. Do you happen to know how to delete the remaining bits?

john lehet

@afrangry @stux Yeah, on the mac I used the “Find Any File” App. I did this I think on Sunday. Many of the bits I found had been updated that day, in spite of my having deleted Chrome months ago. If you do a web search on this you can see Google does this and these embedded updaters are aggressive. Some people report bad impacts from them.

I noticed when I had an error on a backup. Checking, it was one of these files which had apparently been in the middle of updating during the backup.

Fabio Baccaglioni

@stux i only use it for testing purposes 😅 just for the cookies and that when testing a new login or something

Kawa Tora

@stux
I am 100% on a VPN. PC and phone, it's always running. Not just for general privacy but for streaming and torrents.

Daniel 🇺🇦 🏳️‍⚧️ 🏳️‍🌈 🖖

@KawaTora @stux regardless of browser, a VPN is the only sure fire way to prevent your ISP from having access to all of your network connection history (this includes more than just web traffic). Some governments will, for instance, seed torrents of copyrighted material. ISP’s send them customer IP traffic, and if the IP of the government’s torrent seed is on the list, the ISP will send a warning letter to the user; in some cases the user will be indicted. I wonder how long it will be before VPN services are required to send IP data for their users to governments...

@KawaTora @stux regardless of browser, a VPN is the only sure fire way to prevent your ISP from having access to all of your network connection history (this includes more than just web traffic). Some governments will, for instance, seed torrents of copyrighted material. ISP’s send them customer IP traffic, and if the IP of the government’s torrent seed is on the list, the ISP will send a warning letter to the user; in some cases the user will be indicted. I wonder how long it will be before VPN...

Kawa Tora

@exsangus
Happened to me once and from that time forward I used a VPN

Daniel 🇺🇦 🏳️‍⚧️ 🏳️‍🌈 🖖

@KawaTora totally blows my mind that people think that bill gates is shooting them up with nano bots in the COVID vaccines when they already have better (and way cheaper) ways of getting all your data already... “I refuse to get vaccinated because they are trying to track me. You can read all about the real facts in my Facebook page.” Oh the irony.

Kawa Tora

@exsangus
Or even their personal vices.
"I know the government is putting something in the vaccine that will kill us all later. They aren't going to trick me. I'm too smart" Meanwhile they are puffing on a cigarette and drinking alcohol by the gallon.

SuperMoosie

@KawaTora

Doesn't matter if you are using a VPN, Governments are buying netflow data from ISP's which can piece together what sites you have been visiting.

vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/dat

@exsangus

afrangry

@stux that said, I think the main problem is that the general public don't know precisely what incognito can and can't do. Just because it can't prevent ISP from peeking into your browsing history doesn't mean incognito is useless, just saying.

Daarin

@stux Just to clarify: It doesn't matter if you use Chrome or Firefox for this! Your ISP knows!

KubikPixel™

@stux why some people use @torproject, @i2p, @Freenet and/or #GNUnet?

🤷 → 🧅🙋🐰🦬

[UPDATE]
I now ask the Fediverse what tools people use for their privacy online:
:mastodon: chaos.social/@kubikpixel/11184

DELETED

@stux If the problem is your ISP spying, you can just use ECH on Firefox to quickly fix this
support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/u

I'd actually be much more concerned with Google's "browser" (spyware at this point really) :blobCat_giggle:.

Александр

@stux In my opinion the feature itself isn't a problem but browsers picked up really bad name for it. Chrome's "Incognito" is a little better than Firefox's "Private tab" or Edge's "InPrivate" but all can be misleading.

The point of this feature is to try to present you with clean identity to the website you are viewing, this is where you are coming incognito. Also it cleans up some traces from this browsing session locally as a bonus. It far from useless but should be named and explained better.

Regis - HTTP 1.1/418 Teapot

@stux Not for the world, nope. I think of the usefulness of incognito as for avoiding those embarrassing url autocompletions during a zoom and preventing "I'm sorry, your browsing history has WHAT?"

JustAFrog

@stux Browser privacy things just protect against leaving things on the system for your mom to find out what kinks you looked up this week.

If you want the NSA to not know about your kinks, you'll need to step up your game a lot more.

Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻

@stux They can see every ip, but https will prevent them from seeing each page.

streetcoder

@stux Actually they don't with HTTPS. They see the hostname but not the page path. At least if they don't break the certificates and encryption with MITM, what some are doing but aren't allowed to give any details on this.

SuperMoosie

@stux

Your ISP:
What are you doing now?

You: Hiding from government surveillance using a VPN

Your ISP:

We just sold your netflow data to the NSA, hang on was it the NSA, maybe it was China. Couldn't have been the Russians, they purchased last week.

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