I recently switched from chrome to firefox since I don't trust google, and also since firefox seems to have more privacy options. (The "do not track" setting, as well as being able to request third party sites not to track you.) So I was wondering, is firefox really as private as Mozilla makes it out to be?
I think its probably more privet than google. If your really worried about your privacy vpn is usually the way to go but personally I use a few thing in firefox that I believe helps to sicure my privacy a bit better. A programmer I know uses only one extension on his web browser and that is noscript which pretty much doesn’t allow anything to activate on a web page. I found that to be a bit of a hessel. So I use https every where which gets a lot of its code from no script. I also use duckduckgo as my search engine which doesn’t track you and privacy badger which blocks cookies.
Heres my firefox privacy extensions collection :D 
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yea i also use greasemonkey firebug and lightbeam found out that ghostery and disconnect do pretty much the same thing so i got it disabled atm :P
I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer this, correct me if I'm wrong. But I believe there is less data mining being done, if any at all.
Yeah that was my initial assumption since google frankly doesn't have a good track record when it comes to privacy.
Same here. Been using it for a few months.
That's super helpful. I'll be sure to look all those up.
I really don't give a damn. I'm not looking at child porn and I don't pirate so whatever.
That's great but that isn't the reason why many people care about there privacy. There are many other reason's why you should care. For starters have you ever gone to a web site like Amazon and on there home page there are things that you recently viewed. Then there are sections that state because you viewed this you might like this. Well that's logged data that they pulled from you viewing habits to initialize targeted advertisements. The same is done on sites like youtube as well to a very heavy degree. These have two issues one there making money off of your viewing habits without paying you for them. And two you get put into an information bubble which forces the information that you see down to a very limited degree. Also there are many countries that don't allow a lot of websites or censor them greatly to the point where even getting on youtube can in some cases be illegal so people need vpn and there privacy to enjoy some of the same sites we take for granted. Also as a side note crunchroll doesn’t work in Japan you would need a vpn to use that site.
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most sites just ignore the do not track thing, including google.
In Chrome
Settings>Advanced Settings>Privacy>Send a "Do not Track" request with your browser traffic
I assume that that also does the third party stuff as well.
Not that I really disagree that Firefox is more secure but that is a terrible example.
Yeah, but since it's google we're talking about it probably doesn't do much.
I'm not surprised.
I wouldn't use Ghostery they keep logs.
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This. They were bought out by an advterising company, forget the name
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Blur isn't perfect either but a somewhat less shady.
Good to know.
This
This too. I believe Disconnect is the alternative to Ghostery, if I remember.
@0bsidian
Check out privacy.io. There's lots of information on protecting your browsing habits there.
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eventually we're all going to need to boil the frog and realize there isn't privacy on the internet...
I get it's a general principle thing... but really... isn't it more convenient that Amazon shows you the things you've been looking for and google remembers your passwords, etc :P
You're not being smooth, the government can crack 256 AES encryption in 45 seconds because it's back-doored, and if they want anything from your browsing history you're the only person in your entire community that's using whatever VPN you subscribe to...
VPN would be fantastic if everybody used them, but really its more like 200 people in a city and they're probably split between 15 VPN providers and only 10 of them have the VPN active if they aren't perusing something illegal or porn.... and of THOSE 10 people only 1 purchased the account in a way that doesn't directly trace them back to owning a VPN
Like @HK-47 said check out PrivacyTools
Some good stuff within their site
Browser Fingerprint - Is your browser configuration unique?
WebRTC IP Leak Test - Is your IP address leaking?
Excellent Firefox Privacy Addons
Firefox: Privacy Related "about:config" Tweaks
Privacy Respecting Search Engines
Don't use Windows 10 - It's a privacy nightmare
Also, @Screamapillar said something about not caring. It doesn't matter if you don't pirate software or trying to hide. It's about Privacy.
One question...
Do you let unknown person's in your OWN home unannounced and let the unknown person do whatever they want?
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With properly set up encryption, such as encryption with pre-shared secret keys using proven, peer reviewed algorithms, privacy is not only possible but easily within reach of power users.
As a principle, I think people have the right to explicitly choose what they share about themselves with the world. In the current state of the web, a lot of information about you is leaked implicitly or surreptiously, which is the problem.
Carefully choosing the software you use and moderating how you use it, remedies the problem.
Firstly, this is a myth, the AES cipher is completely transparent and peer reviewed - if there was a back door, we would have discovered it by now. Secondly, AES is not your only choice and it's often chained with different ciphers. Thirdly, generation of encryption keys doesn't solely rely on random number generators implemented in hardware (verifiable on Linux), so even if Intel's microcode has been compromised, users are not at risk.
ISPs and other middlemen can indeed tell that you're using VPN. However, the point is that they can't tell what you're sending over the VPN connection.
VPN does not provide deniable encryption but most people simply don't need that.
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