Open-source tests of web browser privacy

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • settings

    Firefox with these settings from Librewolf looks very much equivalent: https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/settings/-/blob/maste...

  • user.js

    Firefox privacy, security and anti-tracking: a comprehensive user.js template for configuration and hardening

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  • whotracks.me

    Data from the largest and longest measurement of online tracking.

    Thank you for the feedback!

    Granted, blocklists (lists of tracking domains or URL query parameters) can be circumvented by a determined attacker. Indeed, I agree that blocklists aren't sufficient on their own for a browser to provide solid privacy protection. In my view it's critical, primarily, to have policies that enforce privacy, including such protections as state partitioning and fingerprinting resistance. That's exactly why I included tests for such policies.

    However: I do think blocklists provide substantial, though incomplete, privacy protection in practice. And, importantly, blocklists are enforced by a number of popular browsers (Brave, DuckDuckGo, Firefox Private Mode, Firefox Focus) and popular browser extensions and other services (uBlock, ClearURLs, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, Disconnect, etc.). These blocklists seem to work pretty well, at least judging by the ad-free experience they provide. So I felt that to give a more complete picture I should test for blocking.

    I tried to avoid cherry picking query parameters or blockers. Here's how I arrived at the current selections for these two sections:

    * Tracking query parameter tests: I tried to gather all the query parameters I could find; the list on the page was my full list at the time. (If there are suggestions for more parameters, I will be happy to add them.)

    * Tracker content blocking tests: I used the list of the top 20 tracking entities from https://whotracks.me. These are, roughly speaking, 20 of the most widespread third-party tracking domains on the web -- they should be a high priority for any browser respecting privacy, in my opinion. I hope testing for blocking of these 20 serves to gives a sense of each browser's approach to third-party tracking scripts and pixels.

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