So as the title mentions, I’m wondering how much is too much?
I am currently using Brave with the setting to:
- Aggressively block trackers & ads
- Only connect with HTTPS
- Block fingerprinting
- Block cross-site cookies
In addition to that, I have installed the following extensions:
- uBlock Origin
- Ghostery
- Decentraleyes
- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
So my question is: Is this overkill? If so, what should/could be removed that may be redundant? I want as much coverage as possible, but not have things bloated.
I mean ublock origin is really all you need imo so I guess one
I disagree. Test your set up here :
https://d3ward.github.io/toolz/adblock.html
I use ublock and ad guard (app and DNS) together to get to 100%.
I get 100% using only ublock in firefox, without configuring either. Note that stacking filters not only reduces performance, but also increases your fingerprint.
speaking of finger printing I use these
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/canvasblocker/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/javascript-restrictor/
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
Oh, I used canvasblocker for a lot of years, it’s great. But I disabled it because from arkenfox it is not recommended together with privacy.resistfingerprinting.
how does your solution fare vs the coveryourtracks link?
I guess reasonably well? It’s hard to assess, but anyway I also use user.js from arkenfox which includes many other changes; they also have this service to detect fingerprints that I suspect you are interested in, it has the particularity to detect tampering.
just firefox + uBlock Origin => 100% - with the correct filterlists enabled ;)
Hmm, interesting tool! With just Brave blocking I get 96%, but turning on uBO, I get 100%.
Very interesting site.
On Vivaldi I get:
No blocking in settings: 39% (how?)
only Ghostery active: 86%
only uBlock active: 100% (ghostery still reports trackers)
Vivaldi Max blocking, no add-ons: 53%
Vivaldi max blocking + Ghostery: 93%
All max blocing and on: 100% (same as just uBlock)
uBlock reports 144 blocked
Ghostery reports 53 blocked
Even with only uBlock I get a report of 144 blocked ads (96%) with 150 tests and the site showing 100% score Interesting. It’s a nice test site, but I think I can conclude in my setup that uBlock is the best blocker, but a combination of Vivaldi’s settings and uBlock is a minimum. No clue if ghostery ads anything, but the site won’t test everything as it’s impossible to do that in the ad war we’re in.
Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to run these tests and share your results!