If you don’t use an adblocker, you should start. Unlike television advertising, Internet ad networks are designed to track you across the web. One big way you can defend yourself against this is to install a good adblocker, like uBlock Origin (but not that uBlock shit. uBlock Origin ).
That’s a good first step, but we can upgrade the blocking experience. If you want to really only get the essential traffic needed to get around on websites, learn to use “medium mode” (“Advanced Filtering”). This way you can block 3rd party JavaScript (code which executes in your web browser) and frames from being loaded. This filters out an amazing amount of junk, BUT it does require you to learn how to use the blocking feature better. It is not a “set-and-forget” option.
If you go into uBlock Origin’s settings, check “I am an advanced user” to get access to these additional options, which you can read about here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-quick-guide
Screenshots for reference are in the link I posted, so the general guidance is like this: You want to globally block 3rd party JS and 3rd party frames. Press the “Lock” icon to save this preference. When you go to websites you will likely find things are broken, to varying levels of acceptance. If the website is broken and you cannot use it, you will want to find the domains which likely help serve the content you’re trying to access (common domains include CloudFlare, Fastly, and CDNs generally). You can set the rule to neutral to follow normal uBlock rules (i.e. if it’s loading something on the ad-list it will block it, otherwise allow it). If you’re very lazy you can set the rules to neutral for all 3rd party JS/frames on the current site you’re browsing. Remember, if you find the settings you want to keep press the lock.
That’s it. Stay safe from surveillance capitalism!
Also you can buy a raspberry pi computer for like 30$ and install pihole on it. This will let you block adds for every device on your network at home, including your phones and shitty “smart” TVs.
While it’d require more care and some knowledge of what you’re doing, you can upgrade the experience further by setting up a personal VPN so that you may get the DNS protection even while away from home. I use WireGuard for this purpose, since it’s been mainlined into the Linux kernel, is 10000x easier to configure than OpenVPN, and performs faster since it doesn’t run in userspace.
I think something like https://www.pivpn.io/ helps make this setup even more streamlined, but I don’t run a raspberry pi for this sort of thing, and can’t comment further on it.
This works great for like 99% of websites, you still get ads on youtube which are a bit annoying, but you can get an adblocker if you’re in a browser or youtube vanced if you’re on android.
Or if you make <300k queries a month and don’t want to set up hardware yourself, use NextDNS. Paid plans are very cheap too and worth it imo. Easier to set up and use even when you’re on the move.
You’re already trusting your ISP with DNS queries. If your ISP doesn’t provide their own DNS then they’re likely sending your data to Google or Cloudflare, in which case NextDNS is significantly better. Sure, this is an extra party but it depends on your threat model I guess.
What exactly is Nano Defender? From what I’ve gathered it blocks websites from knowing you’re using an adblocker, or something of that sort?
hey man you forgot to post links to make sure people go to the right pages, but dont worry i got you
Ublock orgin for:
firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en-GB
uMatrix is good too https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
To explain further - uMatrix is much more advanced, but it lets you do something uBlock cannot do: filter content by type as well as domain. So for instance, you can use uMatrix to block all images from a domain, while allowing images from another domain. And more. It’s a great tool that takes getting used to, but the combination of uBlock Origin and uMatrix is :OK hand:
