Extensions for Privacy and Security – Part 1

Long list of posts and many headlines that discuses Privacy Extensions which either work together or overlap to give better privacy and security while browsing the internet.

Most of those pieces take incredible and extensive measurements to guarantee the best privacy possible without considering the day to day browsing.

In this post we will consider the normal daily browsing, where users want to have a good amount of privacy but at the same time they don’t want to ruin their experience or break sites while they’re browsing.

This is considered as a basic and standard extension that everyone should have, it makes sure that you’re using the secure version of any website by redirecting or accessing the HTTPs version of the website automatically, this is important because there are many sites that either didn’t implement redirection to secure version correctly or the site doesn’t have a secure connection at all.

if you want to go extreme, you can enable “Encrypt All Sites Eligible” option, where it will block the sites that don’t use or have HTTPs.

Where you will start seeing the following message if the site doesn’t have HTTPs, and of course you can access the site anyway by clicking on “proceed anyway”.

The tool is developed by electronic frontier foundation and Tor Project.

The plugin is available on most of the modern browsers ( you can access the whole list from here ) including Firefox, Chrome , Edge.

in general, this plugin will NOT add much to your anonymity, but it will make sure that your connection to the site is over a secure channel if the site supports HTTPs.

PS: the plugin will probably be depreciated in 2022, but until then it’s a very good plugin that i recommend to use , the other alternative is to enforce HTTPs in the browser settings.

Another great extension developed by electronic frontier foundation which blocks trackers on the webpage along with ads.

The difference here about this plugin is it doesn’t block “All” the ads, instead it blocks the ones that are trying to track you so you will see couple of ads showing here and there, but the good thing is that this plugin doesn’t block specific domains that trackers can keep changing, instead it used an algorithm that blocks depending on the behavior of each “tracker”. You can learn more about it from here

The default settings are really strong enough and it does the job well, unless you want to add a specific settings or specific domain to block, i don’t recommend to edit any of the settings.

This plugin will benefit your privacy and anonymity but at the same time it won’t break your experience or the sites you’re visiting and of course if a site breaks you can always exclude from the settings by clicking on the plugin and select “Disable For this site”

Same as the one before, Privacy Badger is available on most of the modern browsers ( you can access the whole list from here ) including Firefox, Chrome , Edge.

my most favourite plugin, ublock origin is one of the best content filtering and ad-blocking, it even blocks YouTube video ads so it is a very handy plugin.

ublock is developer by Raymond Hill, it’s an open source extension that has a lot of settings and very flexible for day to day use, it doesn’t break the site much but you might have some sites are not functioning properly so you might need to disable it for few seconds.

if you enable advanced user mode, you can see which requests passed, which ones were blocked, also you can set the which tracker to be blocked.

the default settings are very good, but i would recommend to go to settings->filter lists and enable all lists that are available

and of course you can block any element you would like from the page and create a rule for it, all you have to do is to right click on which element you would like to block and choose the “block element” option.

you can download the plugin on firefox, chrome , edge

Decentraleyes is a bit of technical plugin that does something technical related on how to develop websites. In short, websites usually import 3 party code to make their site more functional, we call that code “libraries”, these libraries are usually hosted on servers that we call CDN ( Content Delivery Network ) you can learn more about CDN from here and here.

so what this plugin does is it contains some of these libraries, so instead of making the calls to those CDNs to get the libraries, we have them locally managed by Decentraleyes.

so you can say that it enhance the privacy by not telling those CDNs which websites are you visiting to get those libraries.

you can read more about it from the wiki page for the plugin

it’s available for Firefox, Chrome , Edge and you can see the list from here.

Those are one of bests plugins that help with anonymity and bit of security, some other plugins like click &clean or cookie autodelete can be done by changing the browser settings which i prefer more.

also some other plugins like adblock plus , ghostery that does the same thing as ublock are not really recommended since they have a list of whitelist of partners that won’t block and other companies can track you through those partners.