Dashmellow
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- Sep 22, 2013
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The value of the EPIC browser is primarily the fact it hides your IP address via the built in proxy tunnel but the anti tracking and privacy features (mostly) seem to work fairly well. My experience with it has been more or less experimental.
Like you, I primarily use Firefox (31) with a series of add-ons like Ghostery, AdBlock Plus and others. Unfortunately, in today's world this is not enough if you really wish to protect your privacy. Just because you are not seeing more targeted adds in your browsing does not mean that you are no longer being tracked on the internet, followed from site to site and having (multiple) profiles of you created that can come back to effect you later on, even off the internet. (jobs interviews, school admissions, insurance rates, junk mail targeting, etc., as some typical (apparently documented) examples/possibilities).
Another plug-in I would highly recommend is BetterPrivacy This will eliminate (and keep an ongoing cumulative count of ) LSOs (local stored objects) also known as Flash-Cookies or SuperCookies. This is a potentially tenacious type of cookie not everyone is aware of and it is not clear whether they are handled by the Self-Destructing Cookies add on. These flash based objects get stored in a different folder/directory on your computer than "regular"cookies.
Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation introduced Privacy Badger which I am experimenting with but it is only just now in Beta. The version I have at the moment is still alpha. Anyway, it is different than AdBlock, Ghostery or Disconnect and worth having a look at. According to EFF ....... "Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it's like you suddenly disappeared."
The other important issue related to privacy is security and for both, one of the most effective things you can use is the NoScript Security Suite which will prevent Javascript, Java and other exectutables from running without your permission. This plug-in requires proactive decisions to be made with many websites and so it is not for everyone but it can be toggled on and off on a trusted site. I consider this one of the most important security and privacy tools you can have and I encourage people to at least explore it and consider it. Well known security experts like Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte of Security Now recommend it.
Even with ALL of the above you are still being tracked on the internet. Blocking cookies, scripts, trackers etc. can be rendered essentially ineffective by a newer more insidious scheme called Browser Fingerprinting and Device Fingerprinting which is accomplished in several ways. I encourage anyone who is not familiar with Browser Fingerprinting to learn more about this. Start with this article in PC World magazine titled "Browser Fingerprints: A Big Privacy Threat" and have a look at the other links I've provided here. If your privacy is of concern to you it will be worth your while. Then go to EFF's Panopticlick website and test your browser for some astonishing results. There are some methods being developed to counter this invasive technique but they are still not quite there yet. Here is a link to a PDF of EFF's paper on Browser Uniqueness for anyone who wishes to understand this in further detail.
To make matters worse, there is yet another invasive fingerprinting technique which does not require cookies called Canvas Fingerprinting which uses the HTML5 canvas element. This is currently deployed on more than 5000 web sites and more everyday. The most active culprit in deploying this technique is the AddThis social bookmarking people. Fortunately, this one can be defeated more easily with AdBlock, Abine's DoNotTrackMe and NoScript. Read more about Canvas Fingerprinting at PC World Magazine HERE.
Finally, it is a good idea to instruct Firefox to delete ALL data when you quit the browser. If you are not already familiar with this, go to preferences and click "Clear History When Firefox closes", then go to "Clear Recent History" in the drop down History menu and make sure ALL the boxes are checked, especially "Offline Data" and "Cache" and set the time range to "Everything". Then be sure to quit your browser from time to time or just clear your history from time to time while browsing if you don't need to stay logged into a site.
P.S. Living in a rural area I too have only one choice for an ISP, the phone company. It is a miracle we ever got broadband at all. For years they promised to bring cable TV up the mountain road I live on but they stopped a half a mile from my house. Then they brought the cable up from the other direction on my road and also stopped well before they got to my house. Apparently, if the population density is not high enough it's not worth the money to the provider to bring the cable too far into rural areas around here. I live between 1/3 and 1/2 miles away from the next house in either direction. At the moment I can only get 3Mbps DSL but I have now learned that may be changing soon.
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