5 Browser Extensions for Online Privacy in 2020
Stay Safe. It is a Dangerous World Out There
Cover Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash
HTTPS Everywhere
In the early days, the internet was unencrypted and dangerous, allowing many data dumps, password breaches, security leaks, and site infections. To make things safer, a shift from HTTP to HTTPS was started. But still, some of the websites have failed to make the necessary upgrades, increasing your risk of getting attacked.
HTTPS has three main benefits over HTTP.
Authentication. When creating a connection between you and a website, this makes sure you are visiting the actual website, not a clone designed for phishing.
Encryption. This ensures that your data online is encrypted when being transferred to and from. Thereby significantly increasing your privacy.
Data integrity. This is a technique that does not allow data manipulation during the transfer. Thereby making sure the data you send, is the data that will be received.
HTTPS Everywhere requires a secure transfer protocol to all sites that are still running on outdated and insecure configurations. This extension was born due to the collaboration by The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This extension is completely free and available on Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.
Privacy Badger
Privacy Badger extension is hands down the best anti-tracking extension that show you which websites have trackers on you and block them. You would be quite surprised to see how many websites are currently tracking you right now. Even medium has trackers on you. I found 6 trackers by Medium. This extension was developed the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the creators of HTTPS Everywhere. It is very effective on load times as it is a very light-weight extension. It got some bad criticisms in the beginner, but the team worked hard to make it one of the best anti-trackers available.
What makes this extension unique is that it uses a heuristics model, which means that it does not have a predetermined blacklisted tracker database, but it learns about them while you are browsing the web. It might seem to not work as soon as you install it, but the more you use it, the better it becomes. According to Aaron Gershwin, if Privacy Badger encounters the same tracker three times, it attaches it to its list of future blocks.
Cookie AutoDelete
According to Wiki, An HTTP cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user’s computer by the user’s web browser while the user is browsing. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information or to record the user’s browsing activity.
Cookies are stored locally as text files at the device level. Sometimes they are called Access Tokens and are used mainly to identify the user. For example, when you first visit a social media website like Instagram, you register and then log in, Instagram issues a cookie to you at this point. Each time you go to Instagram, you will be identified by the cookie you stored locally. If the cookie is missing or corrupted, you will be asked to log in again.
Unfortunately, cookies also can be used for tracking purposes. When you log in to other websites like Facebook or Gmail, they verify those same cookies and thus tracking your online activities. A huge data breach on Facebook that occurred recently exploited the vulnerability that provided access to user's cookies. That way hackers can reach not only other people’s Facebook account but also any other website that requires them to sign in with the same cookie.
Digital cookies are not as appealing as real-life cookies because they are used to track users online. Although you can always manually delete cookies by going to your browser settings, why do so when you can get a Cookie AutoDelete extension which manually deletes the cookies you choose to be deleted. It is that simple.
Ghostery
This is another exceptional privacy extension that block ads, stop trackers and speed up websites. Although being a bit similar to Privacy Badger, this extension has more features as mentioned above. According to Ghostery,
“Ghostery uncovers the trackers on each website and empowers you to control the ones you don’t want for a cleaner, faster, and safer browsing experience.”
Ghostery enables faster page loads by blocking trackers to declutter webpages and speed up page loads. And to make things even better, it is open-source.
uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin is one of the most popular and widely used extensions for ad-blocking. They have extensions for all browsers including Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera. This extension prevents advertisers from getting their hands on your data by implementing many techniques.
This extension also allows you to set preferences which advertisements to block and which ones to show. Also, it is also known to be a very lightweight and less power-draining extension that will go easy on your hardware(unlike Chrome!!)
That’s the list of top privacy extensions for your browser. Stay safe.
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