Not entirely: your ISP can see what sites you are visiting, but not what pages you are viewing (as long as it’s httpS://). If you don’t trust your ISP with this, you can use e.g. Quad9 DNS wit DoH or DoT.
Comment on Mr Incognito
OwOarchist@pawb.social 23 hours ago
Third panel: Chrome busily writing all this down and sending it to corporate HQ.
nightwatch_admin@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
SethTaylor@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Nope. Not me
“Grandpa goes around and does his business in public, cause grandpa isn’t shady” lol
m.youtube.com/watch?v=qDr9axb7X7E&pp=ygUicmljayBh…
(No but I do use Firefox though)
plutopos@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
Said VPN is Mullvad btw
terranoid@lemmy.cafe 21 hours ago
You don’t need a paid VPN. Tor works. You could use the tor browser bundle.
OwOarchist@pawb.social 21 hours ago
Well, yes, TOR is also an option. And it does have the benefit of being free. But in my experience, it’s much slower. You also end up with a somewhat random final TOR node that could be in any state or any country, which can cause websites to serve you a page in languages you don’t understand … or, sometimes, refuse to load at all. For example, if your exit node is in a US state with a porn ban, some porn sites will refuse to load anything useful for you. Sometimes there’s workarounds for that part, but it’s always quite slow. Maybe okay for images if you’ve got patience, but trying to download or stream videos (or gifs) through TOR is pretty painful in my experience.
With a (good) VPN, you can be protected from ISP spying while still having good, usable internet speed, where things like streaming videos are still practical. And you can (usually) choose where you want your VPN server to be located, so you can avoid those pesky geo-locking issues.
ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
I’m looking into VPNs today actually. I’m considering Mullvad but I’m hesitant to buy anything that I’ve seen ads for, any good suggestions?
OwOarchist@pawb.social 20 hours ago
I’ve heard good things about Mullvad, never used it personally, though. It’s super-cool that they accept envelopes of cash as anonymous payments (or at least they did last time I checked), so you can avoid a paper trail through any payment system if you want. Out of all the VPNs out there, Mullvad seems to be the most serious about preserving privacy and anonymity.
Used NordVPN for a while – can definitely tell you that avoiding things you’ve seen ads for is a good idea. Nothing egregiously terrible about them (that I know of), but they were just as expensive as anyone else, but significantly slower and less reliable. And their Linux client was command line only. (Also, the unreliability was especially annoying because, for some reason, if the VPN went down while connected – either because of VPN server issues or because of internet connection issues – then it would block ALL internet traffic in or out of the machine, and nothing I ever tried could change that without restarting the entire computer. Any connection hiccup whatsoever meant that I’d have absolutely no internet connection anymore until I restarted the computer. That was a pain.)
When my subscription with Nord expired, I shopped around and ended up with PIA instead. PIA has had some bad press, but I like them a lot. They’re one of many no-logging VPNs, but they’re (as far as I know) the only one that has a public legal record of actually snubbing a US government warrant and sending investigators back empty handed. In theory, any no-logging VPN could/should do that, but it’s cool that PIA actually has done that in the past, which kind of proves they’re telling the truth about having no logs and no spying on you. Also, PIA has been a bit faster and much more reliable for me than Nord ever was. No problems and no complaints with PIA – it has all worked very smoothly and reliably, just like it was supposed to. In the (very rare) occasion when I’m having an issue with their VPN server, opening the app and changing servers always fixes the problem quickly and easily. And the cherry on top is that they have a pretty good native GUI client for Linux, so I no longer need to memorize commands for connecting or disconnecting my VPN.
Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 16 hours ago
The best for privacy are definitely mullvad and proton vpn. Nordvpn is the best for p2p/pirating (…not that I condone that…), but not as solid privacy wise. I know that nord and proton have excellent Linux support, idk about mullvad in that respect though.
Honestly though, if you’re just doing this for privacy concerns you might as well just use something like quad9 DNS – for free. VPNs are only really useful faking you’re location or pirating. Not so much for privacy or security. Quad9 + librewolf is king there.
snowydroopz@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Correct me if im wrong, but Zen (based on ff) with manual hardened privacy setting, ublock, and NextDNS for dns over https. i/Isnt that as good as librewolf?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Lots of tracking can still be done.
Pick your poison for the situation, basically. If you really want to stop cross-site tracking for a browsing session, for example, use Cromite, which goes out of its way to actively spoof fingerprinting.
If you are really worried about surveillance for whatever reason, use a Mullad configs
If your ad profile is messed up, use an ad click spoofer instead of uBlock. If you’re concerned about security, use a browser inside a sandbox.
Zen with UBlock is just fine (I use it, sometimes), but there’s really no perfect solution. Keep a few browsers around, like tools for different situations.
Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
Zen is pretty much just the plain firefox hardening settings (check the privacy page on the een website). Librewolf and other hardened forks do a few more things than plain firefox (at the risk of breaking websites).
Of course even plain firefox is better than chrome, add ublock and a custom dns (nextdns or self hosted pihole/technitium) and you should be all good against most things.
Saying this as someone using zen with ublock and self hosted dns, so I might be biased 🙂
Some of the customisations librewolf does can be manually applied to ff/zen iirc
snowydroopz@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Yeah im in the same boat, ublock, manual hardened settings and nextdns with self hosted SearXNG. I assume that would mean i dont need LibreWolf if I’m already doing all it does essentially
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 1 hour ago
There’s one possible disadvantage: accidentally selecting wrong profile. And suddenly I am looking at Monosodium Glutamate through university VPN.