Firefox Privacy Add-ons

I have Better Privacy, Taco, and Ghostery Add-ons in Firefox. I don't even know if they overlapped or not until today. A while ago, Taco updated to Taco 3 with Abine which took me to its website and it said its better than Better Privacy and Ghostery. Does anyone know if Taco 3 with Abine really replaces both Better Privacy and Ghostery?

dja2k

 

Taco3 got some bad reviews. I would stick with Better Privacy, which has a good reputation. I would also add NoScript to your Add-On for better protection. As for Ghostery, it's up to you.

 

Adblock Plus
Ghostery
BetterPrivacy
NoScript
OptimizeGoogle
Redirect Cleaner
SSL Blacklist

Plus, here's one I bet you won't like: remove Adobe Flash. It is one big privacy leak.

You could also drop Adblock Plus and use Privoxy as well.

 

http://hackingexpose.blogspot.com/2010/06/firefoxers-howl-as-privacy-add-on-auto.html

I uninstalled TACO.

/W

 

Here is some info on TACO 3.0:

Read The Register Article Here

I think it's amazing that a useful add-on goes from 8KB to 3MB that is mostly useless.

 

RequestPolicy may be of interest to some of you. Using this and NoScript at the same time is a bit painful though and I opted for NoScript.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9727/

 

You can try the add-on from here to replace TACO: http://www.privacychoice.org/choose
Seems clean to VirusTotal and LinkExtend. Not sure how well it works though.

 

Someone has done some digging on Abine and presents rather incriminating facts over at their forum:

I'm not sure what the last sentence refers to, but after reading who's on their advisory board I wouldn't trust their product at all...

 

I've used it but I don't think it's working as advertised. The firefox statusbar was showing activities to blocked domains. Fired up wireshark and it was indeed not blocking any connections. All it apparently did was stopping content from being displayed.

 

Have you tested Adblock plus? apparently Adblock plus also just prevents the content from being displayed not the connections.

 

I'm also using ABP, it does block connections. It's no replacement for RP though, I've used them side by side together with NoScript. Overkill?

 

That looks pretty cool. So from what I understand, https only works if that option is offered by a website. Is this correct? And so this addon just insures that you are using https when it is an option that is available?

 

Re: EFF HTTPS Everywhere

What's going on with this EFF HTTPS Everywhere calling out to 66.230.230.230 and downloading Application Data. Also called out to 213.112.109.122.

I closed everything down but left it connected, when I returned it had been active.
Does this thing self update the rules or the plugin?

I'm not happy.

 

Re: EFF HTTPS Everywhere

Are you located in Sweden? That IP belongs to Bredbandsbolaget and could be your ISPs DNS?

regards,
T

 

It's either TOR or the new Add-on which is brought to us from the people at TOR.
I'm not sure which.
If I see key exchanges and certificates it's TOR updating?
Is the EFF in Sweden?

 

Thanks Ronjor.

Makes me feel a little better.

 

After reading your post, I was a bit disappointed with RequestPolicy. Especially seeing as it can be a PITA at times (no fault of the extension - just the usual trade-off for more security). So I decided to do some testing of my own. I fired up URL Snooper2 and as an example at Fark.com, I got 110 URL hits with RequestPolicy uninstalled and only 26 with it installed. It does seem to me that it is blocking some connections. I think I'll keep it after all.

 

I've last used RP months ago and got rid of it after seeing it wasn't working properly. So I gave it another go and it looks like they fixed it Probably was just some random bug. Thanks for the heads up!

 

Cool! Thanks for validating my findings and giving me the idea to check it out.

 

Cryptohippie won't connect when I have this addon installed. I primarily use Xerobank but sometimes cryptohippie.

The way Cryptohippie works is you connect the VPN and open your browser. The browser automatically directs you to Cryptohippie's login and you have to enter your login and pass. But I tried connecting last night and instead of going directly to Cryptohippie it tried to open Google, which it could not. I closed the browser, disconnected, and tried again several times to no avail..

The only thing that I had changed that day was I had added Ghostery and the EFF addon. So I uninstalled Ghostery and that had no effect. But when I uninstalled the EFF addon I was immediately directed to the Cryptohippie login page. I thought this might just be a coincidence and not the cause so I tried again today with the same result. This really sucks because I like the EFF extension.

Xerobank seems to be unaffected by this addon.