Protect yourself from privacy-defeating ad trackers and malicious JavaScript with these privacy-protecting plugins.
Although your phone is probably the biggest threat to your privacy, your web browser is a close second. In the interest of providing you targeted ads, the web is littered with technology that attempts to track each site you go to via a combination of cookies and JavaScript snippets. These trackers aren't just a privacy threat, they are also a security threat. Because of how ubiquitous these ad networks are, attackers have figured out ways to infiltrate some of them and make them serve up even more malicious code.
The good news is that a series of privacy plugins work well with Firefox under Linux. They show up as part of the standard list of approved add-ons and will help protect you against these kinds of threats. Many different privacy plugins exist, but instead of covering them all, in this article, I highlight some of my personal favorites—the ones I install on all of my browsers. Although I discuss these plugins in the context of Firefox, many of them also are available for other Linux browsers. Because all of these plugins are standard Firefox add-ons, you can install them through your regular Firefox add-on search panel.
Privacy Badger
The EFF has done a lot of work recently to improve privacy and security for average users online, and its Privacy Badger plugin is the first one I want to cover here. The idea behind Privacy Badger is to apply some of the tools from different plugins like AdBlock Plus, Ghostery and others that inspect third-party JavaScript on a page. When that JavaScript comes from a known tracking network or attempts to install a tracking cookie on your computer, Privacy Badger steps in and blocks it.
If so many other plugins do something similar, why re-invent the wheel with Privacy Badger? Well, the downside to many of the other tools is that they often require user intervention to tweak and tune. Although it's great for people who want to spend their time doing that, average users probably rather would spend their time actually browsing the web. Privacy Badger has focused on providing similar protection without requiring any special tweaking or tuning. As you browse the web, it keeps track of these different sites, and by observing their behavior, decides whether they are tracking you.
from Linux Journal - The Original Magazine of the Linux Community https://ift.tt/2xkZMxf
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