Re: [tor-talk] Tracking blocker

[Seth David Schoen <schoen@xxxxxxx>]

Paul A. Crable writes:

> 	A NYT article yesterday discussed tracking blockers and
> 	recommended Disconnect from among four candidates for
> 	Intel-architecture computers.  Disconnect would be installed
> 	as an add-on to Firefox.  You have a standing recommendation
> 	that we not install add-ons to the TOR browser.  Would that
> 	prohibition apply to the tracking blocker Disconnect?

The recommendation not to install add-ons is because they will make
your Tor browser more different from others and so potentially more
recognizable to sites you visit -- because they could look at their
logs and say "oh, that's the Tor Browser user who was also using
Disconnect!".  If you didn't use Disconnect, they wouldn't necessarily
have a straightforward way to distinguish you from any other Tor Browser
users who also visited the site, or to speculate about whether a Tor
Browser user who visited site A was also the same Tor Browser user who
visited site B.

The Tor Browser design already provides quite strong tracker protection
compared to a run-of-the-mill desktop web browser because of all of the
ways that it tries not to keep state between sessions, tries not to let
sites find out many things about your computer or browser, and tries not
to let one site see what you've done on another site.

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

If you can point out a specific way that Disconnect protects your privacy
that Tor Browser currently doesn't, or if the Disconnect developers
can think of one, it might be constructive to bring it up with the Tor
Browser developers, because they might be willing to consider adding it
as a standard feature for all users.

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen@xxxxxxx>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA  94109       +1 415 436 9333 x107
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