5 Ways to Thwart Spies

[rcjordan]

I'm pulling roughly 2000 headlines a day from about 70 sources.  About 40% of those make it past my filters.  I'd estimate my ctr at 25%.  Many of the sources provide good headlines for the mile-high view but rarely draw the click (Reuters, for example). I end up going to a few dozen sites daily and they tend to be repeat providers.

>open the link in a Tor browser or virtual machine

I wrote the reader to use a feed source profile with both a 'pull' and a 'display' template.  If they provide a full feed, I could set it up to read it off-site but I've found I don't like reading that way. Need some eye-candy, I guess.  But I've been thinking more & more about pulling full text whether they had an rss feed or not. I could aggregate some twitter accounts, for instance, and just assimilate them into my reading sessions.   It would be fairly easy to segregate feeds into a session that required a Tor browser or VM but I'm not that paranoid. Yet.

[Brad]

>RSS

I never thought of it in this context.  I'm going to start firing up Feedly again.

There are so many bad actors out there I think it's better to be a little bit over paranoid now than sorry later.

Siloing can help on some levels: if you use free services split them up across many providers, Google for calendar sync, Hotmail for email, DDG for search, iOS or BB for smartphone. So if one service has a breach the bad guys don't get all your eggs in one basket.

[rcjordan]

Update: new privacy badger out.  I have been running it on chrome for a day.  Seems good. UI very good.

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/08/07/effs-privacy-badger-extension-is-finally-ready-to-block-super-cookies/

[rcjordan]

update:

Privacy Badger (Chrome) now lets you export/backup your user data.

[rcjordan]

> easier to use NoScript/ScriptSafe

Scriptsafe looks to be the way to go with Chrome. I like the backend, reminds me of Ublock.

https://www.andryou.com/scriptsafe/

(I was running http://webkay.robinlinus.com/ and script-blocking seemed to be the universal answer to up the browser secuirty game for more sophisticated tracking exploits.)

[rcjordan]

>ScriptSafe

Of the 3 privacy extensions I run (ScriptSafe, Privacy Badger, Ublock), ScriptSafe is the meanest AND the biggest pita --which makes it the most effective, I guess.  Every domain and subdomain is blocked by default and  you're forced to check off -often by guessing- all of the 3rd domain assets a site might use to build a page.  Text usually displays even in the default mode but it can take a few trial-and-error reloads to get the pix & vids unblocked.  Media sites, in particular, might have as many as 20-25 items blocked, ranging from ad networks to CDNs. 

<added>
ScriptSafe does have the option of exporting/importing your custom user data.