There is this thing that confuses me a little.
Let’s say you use a internet browser and you hardened the privacy. Meaning you installed all the privacy addons like uBlock Origin and you set strict rules, you blocked all the fingerprinting and everything.
But unfortunately it breaks many websites and some of them won’t work. Then what? You really need to use this website.
So you allow third party scripts, you allow this Google tracker, this Microsoft tracker, this Apple and Amazon tracker and so on and so on… (I exaggerated lit a bit) until the website works again.
So then what is the point of hardening of your browser when you might be forced to allow many things again on many websites?
Usually websites work fine with the trackers blocked
But yes, privacy is always a balance between convenience and “block everything”. If you really want/need to use a website you’ll have to allow 3rd party scripts etc. until it works. Or run a browser in a VM for just those “difficult” sites.
It still gives you more security/privacy while “just surfing the web” when you visit many new sites the first time etc.
There is no silver bullet, but browser compartmentalisation can be the best strategy. You can use different browsers or profiles for specific uses.
I use Firefox for personal stuff,
Mullvad browser for sites I don’t need to login,
Brave and Vivaldi for work. I also have a clean Brave profile in case of breakage.
95% of the stuff I do online works just fine with all my layers of blockers etc. activated. A big part of this is probably also me just actively rejecting to use services that are not privacy-friendly in the first place, and most often these are the only ones that can cause issues. There is currently a single site that I need to use a few times a week which just works a lot better with a more vanilla setup, and I simply have a separate Firefox profile for that. Really, profiles in Firefox go a long way and are very powerful. There is not a really great UI for them but “about:profiles” does everything I need it to. That is, in the 5% of time I actually need it. I don’t really “surf” the web like in the olden days, I have some of web UIs of my self-hosted stuff, like a Git forge, Matrix client, Music streaming client etc. and then maybe I visit a few forums like this one and a few news sites plus Wikipedia. Not much more.
