I haven’t seen this DuckDuckGo Firefox addon discussed. Are any of its features adding anything to a well-configured Firefox? Just another addon to add our fingerprint?
Aside from its main features, it lists the following:
ADDITIONAL PROTECTIONS NOT AVAILABLE ON MOST BROWSERS
Link Tracking Protection — helps stop companies from gathering your browsing history and other information via personal identifiers embedded in the links you click on.
Embedded Social Content Tracking Protection — blocks embedded Facebook content around the web so they can’t track you through their videos, posts, and comments found on other sites. You can easily unblock to view them if desired.
Google AMP Protection — forces sites to load content directly from publishers instead of using Google-owned links, which are full of creepy trackers.
Signal Your Privacy Preference with Global Privacy Control (GPC) — built-into our app, GPC intends to help you express your opt-out rights automatically by telling websites not to sell or share your personal information. Whether it can be used to enforce your legal rights (for example, current or future CCPA, GDPR requirements) depends on the laws in your jurisdiction.
Manifest V2 extensions are highly privileged and a huge security risk which is why Chrome dropped it. uBlock Origin can access data from every website you visit.
While this is true, you have to weigh this risk against the removed tracking and the ads which are in themself a huge security risk, too. In my eyes this still leads to a huge net positive effect.
Blocking ads doesn’t improve security or privacy. It’s just a convenience tool, and besides, it’s immoral to block advertisements since you’re stripping content creators of their revenue. Those who still want to block ads should use the Brave Browser (which is behind Chrome and Edge in terms of security) or use a VPN with tracker blocking.
Hey Tommy, long time no see.
Morality is different for a lot of people, so let’s not even go there.
Categorically stating that ad blocking with uBlock does not improve security and privacy is just plain wrong though and you know it.
It sure isn’t perfect and has issues but it does not do nothing.
uBlock Origin is not an “ad blocker”. It is a wide spectrum content blocker, supporting the removal of misleading ads, malicious trackers, malicious scripts, and also supporting Google SafeBrowsing-like features through the Online Malicious URL Blocklist and Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list.
Manifest v3 might be argued to control web extensions permissions better, but causing reduced functionality for content blockers, trading off privacy for security.
uBlock Origin being built on Manifest v2 doesn’t make it dangerous. Manifest v3-based extensions can also be used maliciously to track user browsing, steal user credentials and tokens, etc. uBlock Origin’s code is open source on Github, with 34k stars and is trusted by many.
DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is open source on Github, However based on the company’s past actions I will not trust the DuckDuckGo addon.
By checking the uBlock Origin source code, you can indeed see that it is just following the rules set up in the filter lists to block web requests, not executing any backdoors.
original Tor Browser only bundle the basic suite of extensions needed for reliable anonymous browsing because the higher the amount of extensions, the greater the attack surface, and if one of the included extensions becomes compromised (the developer’s repo taken over by attackers or a website exploit a CVE in it) malicious scripts can be executed.
