Easy privacy guide for surfing the web

Easy privacy guide for surfing the web

(This was a blog post that I originally wrote on my good friend Tek’s blog. I decided to move this over to my blog to consolidate and preserve it here.)

Let me start out by saying this guide is going to be different than most others. A lot of guide pretty much just suggest browse in incognito and use some shitty VPN they get a referral link to. I will be explaining the same set up I use to “securely” browse the web.

*Note, there is no such thing as perfect security and any malware on your computer can totally nullify any efforts of using security oriented browsing software*

The intended audience for this guide is going to be the average person who is not trying to send secret documents or anything super secret/illegal but just wants to use the web and not have to worry about any info being leaked out.

Steps:

  • Download and install Firefox here or through your command line
  • Go ahead and install the follow add-ons, later I will tell you how to configure them and what they mean. uBlock Origin, Random Agent Spoofer, Disconnect, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, Disable WebRTC.
  • Once you install them all go ahead and restart Firefox and then open up settings.
  • Go ahead and change your search provider to your favorite. DuckDuckGo is best for privacy minded folks, where as Google is good if you want tailored search results.
  • Next open up Privacy. Make sure your settings look like this. If you want you can enable Firefox to remember your search history.

Setting up the add-ons:

  •      For Disable WebRTC, HTTPS Everywhere, Disconnect, and Privacy Badger go ahead and leave the settings to their defaults unless you want to block an extra site.
  •      For uBlock Origin go under 3rd party filters and select the ones you want. Mine look like this:
3.
  • For Random Agent Spoofer select the following:

If you want to white list a website then you can set the following rule under the white list tab: {“url”:”WEBSITE_TO_WHITELIST”,”options”:[“canvas”,”referer”,”xff”,”via”,”ifnonematch”,”authorization”]}.

  • Under Options -> Standard Options enable the following

VPN:

For a vpn I would recommend using https://www.privateinternetaccess.com they have many awesome features and I have never had any issues with their speed. In terms of settings I would recommend using these options:

If you want you can enable the PIA MACE which works pretty well but you are already using uBlock, Disconnect, and Privacy Badger.

Finally

Go to https://browserleaks.com/ and test out your new browser.

You will now be harder to track and identified. You may need to white list websites/trackers on certain websites for them to work but that is on a case by case basis.

I hope this guide helped. If you have any comments or questions you can reach out to me on twitter here

If you have any questions or comments feel free to tweet me at @bl4ckneon (Hacker/security Twitter) or @starfox707 (Personal Twitter) or find me on Demonsaw!