it's worth asking the simple question: what can you do to keep control
of information about your online activities? While some folks think
it's paranoid to worry about this, others prefer to choose what they
tell the data collectors. Fortunately, there'sa tool as close as your
desktop that can help you considerably in this area: the Firefox web
browser.
Firefox's privacy controls start with its built-in preferences. Here
you can decide whether to accept cookies, and specifically whether to
accept third-party cookies (which are often used for tracking your
travels around the net). You can also decide when your cookie stash
should be deleted. These are relatively blunt instruments, though. For
enhanced privacy protection, you need to turn to Firefox extensions.
Fortunately, there are a number of good choices in this arena. 
Cookie Control
- A good place to start is with exercising more control over your
cookies. There are a number of add-ons in this area, including Cookie Monster and Cookie Whitelist,
These add-ons generally let you see what cookies a site is leaving
behind, give you finer-grained control over when cookies are deleted,
and let you set site-by-site permissions for leaving cookies. I like CookieSafe Lite, which also adds a blocklist of known tracking cookies that you can deny with a single click.
Proxy Surfing
- Another line of defense is to push your surfing through a proxy
server, so that it's harder to track it back to your own IP address.
While you can do this by setting up Firefox with a proxy server in your
network settings, you're better off with more granular control, since
using an anonymizing proxy can be slow. FoxyProxy
is a hugely flexible add-on here, letting you define URL patterns that
automatically switch between multiple proxies, but its configuration
options can be overwhelming (and confusing). For simpler alternatives,
look at PhProxy, Tor-Proxy.NET Toolbar, or TorButton (my favorite due to the extra options available for extremely paranoid use).
Extra Protection - There are a few bits of extra privacy protection available that don't fit into either of the above categories. SquiggleSR
is designed to keep search engines from building up a good profile of
you by randomly performing searches and clicking on results in the
background.
Loading...
