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Why is this episode of NOVA about data privacy recommending Privacy Badger?

Secrets in Your Data

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/secrets-in-your-data/

Find out who’s using your data and what you can do about it.

I was under the impression that Privacy Badger wasn't considered useful any more . . . ? They should've just recommended using Firefox instead, yes?

EDIT: They spoke to, but IMHO, did not give enough time to, Cory Doctorow and Brewster Kahle. They mentioned Mastodon 👍, and described the Fediverse while not actually calling it that! A bit frustrating.

17 comments

vox

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the only reason I'm still using Privacy Badger is the feature that hides embeeded iframe widgets until a "view" button is clicked (for example, embeeded tweets etc)

bbbhltz

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Maybe just bad research. I haven't tried, but I'm sure if you search for "how to protect yourself online" some of the SEO manipulating websites show up in the first results.

hedge

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Well, they spoke with the EFF which made Privacy Badger, so maybe that's why. They did the password thing with the dice, tho, which I guess is good.

bbbhltz

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Ok. Makes sense. The video is geoblocked for me so I probably should've kept my mouth shut

kath

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pbs.org is yt-dlp compatible

hedge

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That's good to know, thanks!

seang96

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I saw a GitHub repo that explained add-ons that are "useless" and add more finger printing. The biggest reason of them being useless was generally the fact unlock origin already has the feature too.

Frostcoins

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This is the GitHub repo wiki you are referring to, hopefully helps others declutter their extensions.

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother

seang96

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Nice! Stared it this time.

Melody

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This is factually wrong; as installed plugins aren't accessible to just any webpage...and plugins actually exist that obscure this anyways.

Not to mention there's more hardened forks of modern browsers that don't share plugin information anyways.

seang96

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That's not just how fingerprinting works. Any setting on your browser that is not default and any addon makes your browser setup more unique. From my understanding they don't need to access your plugin listing or request settings because they can also do it based off of how the browser behaves. If you disable JavaScript entirely I suppose you wouldn't have this issue though.

Umbrias

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Why would librewolf specifically advise that you minimize your extensions to decrease client uniqueness if it had no effect on client uniqueness? Someone's misinformed, and I don't think its librewolf.

Hirom

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Ghostery, Disconnect, Privacy Badger, etc

Redundant with Total Cookie Protection (dFPI)

Privacy Badger does more than dFPI. dFPI just isolate cookies. Privacy Badger blocks cookies. And completely block connection to some hosts that are dedicated to tracking, which prevent other forms of tracking that aren't cookie-based.

MonkderDritte

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Wasn't privacy badger the addon owned by a suspicious company? And telemetry or something?

scytale

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It’s owned by EFF, which AFAIK is still a trusted org. You might be thinking of Adblock Plus or Ghostery.

MonkderDritte

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Right , Ghostery, my bad.

bbbhltz

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If you are geoblocked you can stream it with https://ga.pbs-video.pbs.org/videos/nova/de12ed2c-17e6-4434-a430-7f80c26a6002/2000426341/hd-16x9-mezzanine-1080p/nova5107-AABR-AVC_793.m3u8 with mpv

See also: this thread on Mastodon https://octodon.social/@cwebber/112451933593063510