Tracker Blocking Browser Extensions

@Penelope Pitstop: That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing! I've been following this from a different angle myself lately, since I've been looking into "data brokers" trying to learn more about what's happening with my data. And it seems pretty dire at times.

Honestly I already hadn't been using "anti-tracking" much, since it breaks a lot of things: extensions, websites, browser information. Obviously some of this is intentional as they can present a risk to anonimization and privacy. But I think that we need to draw a distinction between these. An entity may not know who I am (anonymity) yet still track my browsing habits (privacy) using things like fingerprinting and cross-reference the data.

Ultimately things like TOR, VPN, and anti-tracking are great tools...but I think for most people their effectiveness is not as good as we'd expect, and they come at the expense of not only convenience but being able to use the internet effectively at all in many cases. None of these solutions is a silver bullet, and using more than one to cover different angles can be problematic.

In the past I used Ublock Origin and Adblock Plus, as that was a fairly reasonable balance. But nowadays I'm mostly just using content blockers in iOS since they can work as intended without breaking anything in most cases. 1Blocker (no relation) is my current favourite there. Along with not having to deal with popups or malware, that's my preferred platform for recreational internet use.

I'm glad that more research is being done and information being made available, not so that people don't use these things, but so they're aware of the both the benefits and limitations. Knowledge is power. :)