I think we all draw a line between privacy and convenience and I think I found mine and settled into a comfort zone of sorts. I use Fedora 38. My browser is Mozilla Firefox with it’s “strict” setting. uBlock origin and uMatrix. When I need/want to use a site that doesn’t work due to blocked connections I relax the restrictions in uMatrix or temporarily disable it entirely if I get frustrated or I’m in a hurry. I watch videos on YouTube. Don’t use social media, but I do use Facebook messenger (although I prefer to use Signal with the handful of people I can). I use a Xiaomi phone with custom ad blocking DNS (I’d like to get a Pixel with GrapheneOS someday). I look for an app on F-Droid first, but install it through Google Play if I can’t find what I need there. I use Qwant and DuckDuckGo. I use ReVanced. I do not use a VPN. I think that’s all the relevant information. My question is: how easy do you think it still is for big tech to track me? Are there any suggestions you would have for a person like me that wouldn’t sacrifice too much convenience?
That’s a very solid setup
What’s umatrix for?
Thank you! uMatrix is a browser extension that makes it very easy to block any third party requests a website makes by category. For example, if example.com loads fonts from Google that is considered a third party request. Or if it tries to set a Facebook cookie. uMatrix shows a table (or a matrix) of all the request addresses and categories and you can click on them to block/allow them.
You can do the same with ublock :)
http://digdeeper.club/articles/addons.xhtml#umatrix Read the update from January 2022
uMatrix is no longer maintained. Please see the link:
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother
It doesn’t need to be maintained if it still works on the latest update of the browser. Also, uBlock is not a full replacement, if there will be a full replacement that is maintained, I’ll gladly switch