Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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founded 5 years ago

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Don't see many mentions to Waterfox? (www.waterfox.net)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

50 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Waterfox is a browser, obviously based on Firefox, but without default "junk" that Firefox comes with.

Don't see many mentions to Waterfox at all in this community? Are there any specific reasons for it? Seems like a neat version of Firefox, with development based out of the UK.

Worthwile blogpost on their independence and future updates: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-in-2023/
Project: https://www.waterfox.net
Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/net.waterfox.waterfox

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Using niche browser forks is often not a good idea. These are extremely fast moving projects that need to constantly be updated to stay secure.

This is especially true for Firefox forks, as Firefox allows you to customize it to the point that it is almost the same as many of these forks.

There are exceptions to this - for example, LibreWolf has a fairly good track record and Mullvad Browser needs to fork Firefox to (try) ensure all users have the same fingerprint.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

Definitely a very valid point!

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I feel like this argument is the same argument people use to tell you never to leave the Microsoft ecosystem

You must use Edge, Office, Defender and Azure

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No it's a security and fingerprinting tradeoff.

The more your browser acts to hide your behaviors and limit tracking, the more unique your fingerprint is. The most private browser setup is one which appears to be identical to all the other traffic in a non unique way, or noise. This definitionally lacks information for tracking.

Also security flaws and tracking exploits need to be constantly patched.

This is a fundamental tradeoff for privacy. Using more obscure browsers can (not always) then expose you to behavioral fingerprinting because they look different and react to web pages differently.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Most privacy oriented browsers use popular user agents

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's not just the user agent that fingerprints a user.

Hence a good most of the exact comment you responded to.