Typically adblockers block ads and trackers, but Privacy Magic does much more than that:
- Fingerprinting resistance: Privacy Magic hardens canvas, time zone, battery, audio, and many more APIs to block fingerprinting
- Third-party cookies: all blocked by default
- Tracking URL parameters: all removed
- Browser Ad APIs: all disabled
- Workers and iframes: Hardening is propagated to these contexts
After working for the past decade on Tor Browser, Firefox, and Brave, I wanted to see if it's possible to protect users where 90% of them already are: on Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome and Edge.
I'm happy to answer questions about tradeoffs between privacy and usability!
Project Timestamper is an open-source effort to digitially timestamp real human works of art, movies, literature, and science as they exist today, before AI-created content begins to pollute humanity's cultural heritage with false memories.
hakk is a new REPL-based tool for developing Node.js programs. hakk runs your .js source files, and updates your program as it runs whenever you make a change. Unlike the built-in node repl, hakk lets you re-define consts, functions, and class members while your code is running. It works with any code editor.
I would love to get feedback. Do you find this tool useful? What improvements would you like to see?
Hi! Author of PrivacyTests.org here. Thank you very much for the comment. (I only just saw your reply.) PrivacyTests is very much a work in progress, and all feedback is much appreciated.
Regarding document.referrer, you are absolutely right that there is a cost/reward balance and most browsers have chosen to allow cross-site passing of the referrer. However, there are browsers on Android that do block cross-site referrer altogether (see https://privacytests.org/android.html).
"Media queries" refers to the fingerprinting threat where, for example, screen width and height is divulged. You are right that JavaScript can also be easily used to get screen width and height: any fingerprinting resistance feature should protect against screen fingerprinting via both JS and media queries, in my view. Some browsers already do that, as the results show.
Your question about scale is a good one. Some browsers (such as Firefox and Brave) embed fairly large blocklists. You are right that query parameters can be changed, but in practice I haven't seen any cases of that happening (yet).
As far as I am aware, Safari is (by default) blocking cookies/storage from Google Analytics and similar trackers, but not blocking the scripts themselves. You can see that cookie blocking reflected in the "Tracking cookie protection tests".
You can see which browsers partition state (and which don't) in the State Partitioning section of https://privacytests.org. Firefox passes nearly all of those tests because Total Cookie Protection is enabled by default.
- Fingerprinting resistance: Privacy Magic hardens canvas, time zone, battery, audio, and many more APIs to block fingerprinting - Third-party cookies: all blocked by default - Tracking URL parameters: all removed - Browser Ad APIs: all disabled - Workers and iframes: Hardening is propagated to these contexts
After working for the past decade on Tor Browser, Firefox, and Brave, I wanted to see if it's possible to protect users where 90% of them already are: on Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome and Edge.
I'm happy to answer questions about tradeoffs between privacy and usability!