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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I've had GA's domains redirected to 0.0.0.0 in HOSTS ever since I knew of them.

It's also another one of these single-page-apps that require JavaScript to display any content at all.

I think with such a design they're clearly not targeting the sort of privacy levels that more users on HN than the Internet in general expect.

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Check out RequestPolicy sometime if you're concerned about GA and other tracking and went through the trouble to bit bucket it in hosts; it's really nice to be able to set which other sites any given site can contact, and I trust it more than the other curated options like Ghostery etc. since I can see for myself where each site is allowed to go.

check out noscript then!

RequestPolicy and other tools like HTTPS Switchboard or even Ghostery let you block all content from certain domains, not just JS. They won't even load a tracking pixel. RP is whitelist-based and it can take some time to enable all the domains you actually use. Ghostery is blacklist-based and targets known tracking domains.

> other tools like HTTPS Switchboard

I will take this opportunity to remind people that uMatrix is now available for Firefox (works on Nightly): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

Thanks a lot for porting uMatrix to Firefox. I've been waiting for this since the first time I used HTTPSwitchboard for Chrome!

I run Ghostery as well, but I learned something new, never heard of tracking pixels. I've added RequestPolicy to my suite!

Ghostery should be blocking that sort of content (that's the point), but I really like NoScript and RequestPolicy in conjunction with each other for the control it gives me. Configure firefox to ask to allow flash, and you've got a pretty complete privacy toolset.

Unfortunately the Firefox 38 update broke RequestPolicy.

There are other extensions that do a similar job, including a volunteer effort to continue the original extension, but right now none of them seems quite as neat and reliable as the original.

Is RP not being maintained then? :/ It's one of the tools that makes me actually like FireFox.

there's a maintained fork: https://github.com/RequestPolicyContinued/requestpolicy

uMatrix has been recently released for FF. Basically, it's a better RP

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

That looks similar to existing plug-ins like Policeman. These are great for technically-minded power users who understand the implications, but IMHO they far too complicated for "normal" users who just want a bit of added privacy and security without spending half their lives tweaking configurations.

If you stick to clicking only the hostnames, it's no different than RequestPolicy. Otherwise there is uBlock's dynamic filtering which does essentially the same thing as RequestPolicy:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-de...

Speaking of privacy extensions, I vaguely recall some addon that compartmentalizes cookie/local storage between tabs.

Say I open a youtube.com and it wants to load cross-origin content from google (and thus sends cookies to google) then it can use different cookies than those used when I browse google search directly.

But I can't find it anymore.

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