How I protect myself online

I share my methods of blocking and misguiding ads/tracking/social media corporations.

I never liked ads, since I was a kid. I was muting TV when an ad came up. I stopped watching TV entirely when I saw 9/11 on TV happening live. I was ~13, and decided that TV is too negative and passive to watch it.

If you are young, then you probably think this is a default behaviour - not watching TV and doing everything online. It wasn’t that way 21 years ago.

Why go through the trouble?

There are couple reasons why I spend a lot of time blocking most of the internet from my vision/brain.

Protecting myself with software

I know that what I do is not enough, I have read HackerNews and articles on how to stay anonymous. But at the same time I don’t have enough time to maintain 100% of my privacy. Additionally, I’m not Edward Snowden or Julian Assange - I’m not doing it to avoid prison, so my motivation is much less.

Apart from annoying ads, constant spying I consider clickbaits and most social media (or how we use it) a cancer of the internet. It seems like every week there is a new study proving social media content is harmful, depressin for young people, interfering in democratic processes and making world a worse place. I don’t want to be exposed to it without my consent and control. So I’m using very little, and when I’m consumer, I try to moderate it to be educational/entertainment. I fail at it often, because it’s so easy to fail.

What I’m doing I consider good compromise between keeping some privacy and keeping maintenance to a minimum. I recently bought new laptop and had to do it all manually, so here it is, for my own reference and for your enjoyment, a summary of my steps.

I use Brave browser with some extensions

I used Firefox for a long time, but recently I got tired of mediocre devtools and problems with various video sites.

uBlock origin

I recommend it to everyone. If there is only one thing from that list you could do, do that one.

  https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
  Fuck Fuckadblock 
  Nano Defender Integration
  Nano Filters 
  uBlock-Origin-dev-filter – Google+DuckDuckGo

Decentraleyes

Decentraleyes gives little bit more protection and performance by loading popular scripts from localhost instead of public CDNs.

Reader mode

I have Reader mode extension. I highly recommend taking over control of typography you consume

Search engine

I personally use Startpage.com. I consider using privacy oriented search engine as a must. There is no reason to get exposed to bigcorps more than necessary. You can also try duckduckgo.com, but it’s using Bing for results, so, yeah.

Steven Black /etc/hosts

I use Steven Black. I don’t remember which list I’m choosing, but I copy paste one that I like into /etc/hosts and done. One day I will also put it into my router (or use my RaspberryPi as PiHole). The earlier you block harmful content, the better.

DNS provider - Nextdns.io

Nextdns.io. This is a VPN/DNS provider with some nice little options. Apart from blocking some requests, it gives you some nice statistics, logs, parental controls, allowlist/blocklist. Additionally I hardcode DNS IPs in my machines, so it cannot be overridden by a router. In order: Nextdns, Cloudflare privacy IPv4, CF privacy IPv6.

Youtube

I spend a lot of time on Youtube, so naturally I spent a lot of time optimizing it’s experience.

Extensions

Common sense

Protection habits

Apart from having technical solutions I try to be reasonable with how I use technology.

Twitter

Because of US culture wars that is spilling everywhere I block very liberally.

Instagram

Smartphone

Notifications

eMail

Spark - I use Spark email app on my mac, and some generic one on my android phone (Spark was extremely slow). I think it works better overall than having constantly opened email tab, or loading the slow SPA X times a day.

On my phone I use built-in Gmail app until I switch to a more reasonable email provider, which is hard after using it since it was invite-only.

Story 1

All this aggressive blocking had one interesting situation in my work: When my company tried to implement tracking framework for facebook, google and other privacy thief I couldn’t do it. I’ve spent a week trying to unblock facebook pixels and they were still 404ing. After a month nobody remembered it was needed. Which is also a good test if a feature is really needed, or just someone threw it out there and it sticked. Apparently it was not that crucial.

I consider it a win-win-win-win-win situation.

  1. I couldn’t do something that is clearly against my world-view/philosophy
  2. Our company still had a clean conscious in this tracking infested world
  3. Visitors are tracked a little bit less
  4. Website is MUCH faster because of lack of those heavy scripts
  5. Business people don’t have to look at another 10 metrics, they only focus on those 300 they usually do

Story 2

I met a friend in his house and we sat down next to each other. He opened a website and it was looking… bad. And it loaded like he had 56k modem, not 300Mbps connection.

I opened my laptop (with all the bells and whistles described above) next to his and opened the same page. It worked 10x faster and was straight to the point (content), without distracting fullscreen ad in the background. We had the same machines at the time (base 13” MBP 2015).

No matter the ads/tracking, the performance difference was striking. He could not believe it. I showed him how much of this page was actual page and how much was blocked by uBlock (i think it was around 60%). Long story short, he was converted very quickly and lives happily ever since.

Sad, but true conclusion

I’m a pirate and parasite on the ecosystem of free content. This area of life is one of the very few where I became 100% selfish. I refuse to take part in this kind of business model if I can help it. Fortunately, more and more websites are implementing paywalls, so I can’t exploit them, so I just leave them immediately.

I understand that sometimes it is shooting fly with a cannon and there is a massive amount of collateral damage to creators (especially with SponsorBlock and uBlock origin), but for me it is a matter of survival. I just cannot stay healthy mentally while being exposed to all that crap, tricks, ads, scams, dark patterns.

It is not my role to invent fair ways to monetize content. My role is to keep myself and people around me safe.

Stay safe.