It's Time to Switch to a Privacy Browser | Hacker News Reader

It's Time to Switch to a Privacy Browser

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15 pointswalterbell8 comments

This is sad. This twisted misapprehension of privacy is worse than useless, bit it's so ubiquitous that many people are coming up believing that this rubbish is what online privacy actually means.

Privacy is not about preventing tracking, hiding your identity, disguising your location, or any of the other useless bullshit that these products are all about.

Privacy is about building and curating your online identity to contain the information you want to disclose, and to not contain the information you want to keep private. Maintaining your privacy is about exercising restraint when communicating in forums, when filling out profile information, when posting pictures, or otherwise communicating online.

It's about disconnecting activity from your curated identity as appropriate, but it's not about disappearing entirely; that way leaves an information vacuum for others to fill in ways you may not agree with.

Most of all, it's not about distrust of corporate entities or other concentration of power. It's about learning how to interact with them in ways that benefit you and avoid harm. You don't need to hide from all-powerful watchful eyes, you just need to be reasonably mindful of everyone else who is there online with you, and avoid painting a picture of yourself that you may later regret.

This argument presupposes that users are informed about what is being tracked, what that data can be used for and the user consents. None of these are true. Hell I bet most web devs embedding the tracking script la even understand the full implications of them. To make it worse, The big players are constantly adopting darker and darker patterns to inject more and more tracking.

Does anyone know why iOS is the only major platform where the Tor browser isn't available? Is it an app store restriction?

This might be an over simplification, but my understanding was that all browsers on iOS were essentially just reskinned safari. And that is an app store restriction.

All web browsers on iOS are required to use WebKit. I think they’re actually restricted to a webview and don’t really have any control over the underlying WebKit

"Onion Browser" seems to be able to do it...?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onion-browser/id519296448

(i'm not implying they don't use WebKit, but i meant they provide a browser that uses Tor.)

Which is not at all the same thing as providing "the Tor browser".

iOS browser apps are required to use WebKit, but you can pretty heavily modify things. There is a Tor browser app available, it runs Privoxy internally and proxies all traffic from that WebKit instance. Just one since I'm guessing nobody else could be bothered?

Edit: you also can't control tracking to the same extent the forked Firefox that Tor uses can.

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