BetterPrivacy Prevents Tracking By Flash, Other “Super-Cookies”
Firefox: Even if you regularly clean out your cookies or use a privacy-plus extension like Stealther, Flash videos and other objects leave all kinds of traces on your machine. Until they meet BetterPrivacy, that is.
Billing itself as a “Super-Cookie Safeguard,” BetterPrivacy shows you all the controllers and settings left behind by the Flash-based streaming videos, advertisements, and controls that are nearly ubiquitous on the web these days. You can delete them in the same fashion you would make a purging run through your cookies. Then again, you can do that from the Macromedia settings page, right?
Right. So what BetterPrivacy actually improves on is the future handling of your Flash cookies, DOM storage objects, and other browser odds and ends that might give away your procrastination, or other various and sundry web travels. You can set your browser to always wipe clean your Flash cache and DOM objects, but also set a “do not remove” flag for controllers you want to keep around to ensure easy operation in the future. It can be, as the Mozilla page suggests, an “install and forget add-on,” and one that provides a little more peace of mind.
BetterPrivacy is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.
BetterPrivacy [Firefox Add-Ons]
- Next Post: TidyRead Brings Readable Text Conversion To Smartphones »
- « Previous Post: HLO Day 8: A Burst Of Spontaneity In Ballarat
Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
Best advice is to right click on flash and adjust your settings so all these videos, ads, and other flash crap can't put this junk on your computer. Right click on flash, click Privacy, click Advanced - and it takes you to the settings_manager page online.
GiovanniGautham
Thanks for covering this add-on.
I was using it but was unsure about the perfect settings. Can anyone provide some good settings for it for safe and comfortable (no 100 popups about deleting this and that) browsing?
Thanks
tabledrummer
I've never had my privacy compromised by a cookie. I don't understand why people are so up in arms about them. It just seems like mass-paranoia to me. With millions of people hitting double-click.com ads, I really doubt that those people are over there saying, "hey look at this guy, he visits all these sites, and he lives at 123 main street, and his SSN is xxx-xx-xxxx, and he's got $x dollars in the bank, let's steal his identity and buy a candy bar!"
TheOtherHalf
@TheFu: Well, it didn't find any cookies of any type on my Linux VM. I'm careful, but not **that** careful.
Perhaps it works better on Windows?
TheFu
Thank you! I'll be giving this a try. It would be nice to not have to start a "live distro" VM in order to do daily browsing. Then again, this is just 1 part of the privacy-on-system solution.
And it doesn't remove log files from the network points (routers, ISPs, servers, load balancers, ad-servers) between this PC and the other side. The best answer I've found is a live distro with Tor and connecting via someone else's (not mine) network.
Editors ... please more articles on privacy and how to protect it!
TheFu
Would this work to prevent sites like Megavideo from making you wait 54 minutes until you can continue watching?
Does CCleaner not clean this up? If it does, why would I bother with _another_ extension for FF? I run CCleaner regularly throughout the day, and before shutting down at night.
mjschmidt
@Antony_256: Nice, they fixed it.
Last time I tried it, it resulted in a veeery slow start-up. Let's see now.
@mjschmidt:
CCleaner at the end of the day does a better job and cleans other stuff as well
@Dangger: Nah, i'm pretty sure that's IP-based tracking
Take a look at jondofox if you are looking for a real privacy version of firefox.
It has all the needed addons installed.
[www.jondos.de]
@srudes2: Looks cool, thanks. Is this like of TOR, or maybe a competitor of TOR?
ZalmanFeardie
@projectvirus: Oh!!! The HORROR!
TheOtherHalf
CCleaner twelwe points.. CCleaner Douze Pointe.. :))
ewoks
@Dangger: Get the firefox extension 'SkipScreen'. It can be a little odd at times, but works great!
@TheOtherHalf: It's more like "hey look at this guy, he visits all these sites, and he lives at 123 main street, and his SSN is xxx-xx-xxxx, and he's got $x dollarsin the bank, let's send him some focused, targeted ads relevant to his browsing habits!"
Thank you for this.
swsboarder366
better privacy, no script, ad block plus, anything to keep google free and clear of my computer
@zeep: I find that CCleaner works at the beginning of the day as well. Any old time really. :)
paintbox
@mjschmidt: I immediately thought of CCleaner too. I've been using it for a while now and am quite happy. Glad to see I'm not alone.
Actually, the horror would probably be: "hey look at this guy, he visits all kinds of homosexual (or democrat) websites. Let's ask him if he's not willing to donate some $ to our organization just to prevent us from telling his manager about this... Man wake up! Your health insurance _is_ interested in such data.Once profiled you won't get outta that quickly...
GiannaEchidna