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.

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Very simple way to improve your privacy and security massively. (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I highly recommend disabling JavaScript by default in your browser and then whitelisting the websites that you use frequently and need JavaScript to function.

The privacy benefit of this is that when you read articles online or visit new websites, most of the time it will not need JavaScript to function which will stop loading a lot of ads and tracking scripts.

The security benefit here is massive, first if you visited a bad link that contains a malware that is dependent on JavaScript it would not work, secondly if you visited a link for a service that you use and JavaScript did not work there, then you can see in real time that this is a fake page and not the real websitewebsite you intended to visit.

Bonus tip: try to replace the unnecessary websites that can't work without JavaScript and you need by JavaScript free websites or open source apps.

Disclaimer: Stay cautious. This recommendation will improve your privacy and security, but it does not protect you from everything.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You'd end up whitelisting sob many sites that it makes this approach worthless in my opinion.

Instead I've settled on blocking scripts by default and whitelisting subdomains until the site works. It does require more time and effort, but it's probably the only way to meaningfully block parts of javascript apart from just not using that website.
Depending on how exactly you so this, you'll end up with a huge filter list. Mine in uBlock Origin has 245kB when exported.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

You do end up whitelisting a lot of sites, but seeing that a site is using Javascript this way lets you weigh up if you feel it's worth the security risk to enable it or not.