Privacy wins and fails for December

General
1

On the Techlore Forum, there was a post each week where people would talk about their privacy wins. Since this hasn’t been available to us in a little while, I think this should be open for all of December but feel free to comment about the good and bad for the past several months.

I envision the comments here to include both online and offline as well as privacy, security, and anonymity events in your life.

I’m going to create a new post each Sunday morning or Saturday evening.

Tor v Mullvad Browser
I install Tor browser (with Ublock Origin) on Fedora Workstation and GrapheneOS.

Step one for me was to determine usability. This was accomplished by visiting every bookmark I have - over 400. The blocks are about 10%. This is less than I expected. Some sites showed me an “Access Denied” or “You are blocked” message. Others just timed out after trying several circuits, not a block but does count as not accessible.

I used Tor for several days before the slowness got on my nerves. I deciding to switch to Mullvad Browser which runs much faster and doesn’t suffer from being blocked. Changing vpn locations seems to be a major part of Mullvad avoiding being fingerprinted.

Fingerprinting browser on Android
Tor on my GrapheneOS shows the same visitor ID every time at fingerprint.com. On desktop, restarting Tor will give a new user ID as long as I connect to a new circuit. On my phone, it’s the same ID no even with a fresh install of Tor.

Is this expected behavior?

Tails OS
This was my next mission. With so many threats about blocking vpns, I decided to install Tails OS on a thumb drive and get familiar with how it works.
I like it but I don’t think I’ll be using it on a regular bases. This is just prep encase the internet in my country goes sideways.
I notice that Tor browser has UBO pre-installed so I guess installing it myself in Tor browser is fine.

Orbot
I gave this a try on my phone for a few hours. For me, it’s pretty much not usable. Often fails to connect and when it does is far slower than the Tor browser.

Addy email alias
Proton’s Linux support is lacking so I’m not going to renew my Unlimited Proton account and need to find alternatives.
Yesterday, I gave Addy a try. I like it. Using the free account for the moment but it’s very inexpensive to upgrade.

Protonvpn CLI
Proton’s Linux client is such a disappointing mess on Fedora I decided to try their terminal option.
I like it. Doesn’t get any cleaner of a UI than a terminal window. Very easy to switch locations.
Here is Proton’s page How to use the Proton VPN Linux CLI | Proton VPN
List of servers VPN server list: Secure Proton VPN servers in 120+ countries | Proton VPN

Anyway, that’s my journey for the past week or so. What have you been up to?

9 Likes
2

Very cutesy idea, I am sure this will be a nice initiative for people to feel like a community!

This is expected. These sites are famously unreliable. Only people who are already using unique setups go to these sites (average user does not know fingerprinting is), then they keep reloading, and are met with an unchanging ID.

It works on a mixture of IP, browser’s reported timezone, and other indicators with a heavy dose of heuristics, all of which are easy to do when someone visits the page with same IP, same timezone (and both usually dissimilar) within minutes of each other (easy heuristic to track).

I have used these libraries in production, they are mostly useless at actually tracking users across sessions. I would not worry about it. If you wish resistance to fingerprinting as primary need, use tor browser. Vanadium is decent at mixing you with the grapheneOS users on VPNs.

As always, remember that Google or Apple or Facebook does not need to do all this to get user data, most people opt in to share it.

You can try the new tor VPN in alpha, although no proxy last I checked. (The Tor Project / Applications / vpn · GitLab)

I have finally moved all my media away from cloud using local media and gaming server, and distributed the cost among friends who can access it with a nominal fee for hardware costs. Happy to finally be cloudfree, everything either p2p or on a home lab (I also wrote a post about browser syncing between vanadium and secureblue’s trivalent, which freed me from Brave).

Next time cloudflate goes down or my favorite streaming site has licensing issues, I am unaffected :))

1 Like
3

never expected this time comes, I was considering doing weekly privacy wins and streaming my reaction and takes like techlore used to but posting a thread every week in here does make me have an odd feeling, almost as if using the forum to my advantage than say staff’s advantage which is what I dont wanna interfere with, but if everyone is fine with it I can open up to it.

Of course unless @jonah wanna help or take up on that offer themselves, but I also understand I dont think there would be sufficient staff to cover that unless idk hypothetically get hired for that but you get what I mean we will see.

4

I wasn’t sure if the mods would be ok with this either.

I asked @jonah before I posted. He is fine with this.

1 Like
5

once in a while may be fine but weekly is a different beast hence still question remains

6

Considering the lack of traffic, I can’t see me bothering with this next week. Oh well.

7

Maybe we can start a weekly thread for this!

Nothing wrong with posting your own wins individually though. Thanks for bringing this up.

2 Likes
8

I’m good with staff taking this on.

You’re welcome.

9

Same here, incorporating a weekly stream would be great too

10

Sorry, I haven’t really been around much the last few weeks either, traffic was pretty low over the holidays. Maybe we make this a monthly thing and you could post another one for January? We could make it a sticky post for the month and see if more people are interested :slight_smile:

2 Likes
11

Sounds good. I’ll mark it in my calendar as a repeating event and post on the first of every month.

1 Like