With privacy being a topic constantly on the rise, one could naively assume that simply using a VPN sorts out most of our privacy problems. I am afraid it simply doesn't in most cases and the key to staying on top of the game is staying educated.
Not till long ago I've realised I was doing a rookie mistake in that with my naivity I've assumed that simply launching a VPN on my everyday PC and carrying on browsing boosts my privacy to a much better degree.
Having educated myself to a little better degree in regards to how the big boys (e.g. Google & Facebook) are tracking our activity through Browser Fingerprinting I've now got a miserable mental picture of those laughing right in my face.
Basically my rookie mistake consisted of using the same browser through which I sign in to services like Google in conjunction with the VPN. Whilst this protected exposing my privacy to some third parties including my ISP it certainly hasn't stopped Google tracking me, even if I would've signed out from Google on the session before.
With those big boys constantly on a technological advance I personally wouldn't trust most of the plugins, built-in features or even Incognito mode in the Browsers from protecting most of the current fingerprinting solutions.
With that being said and the main problem being posed as privacy within a Browser I would like to think there is a somewhat an easy way out of this and this would be to isolate your browser activity.
For a start, you could leave you current Browser as is and just mentally label it as 'all-crap-that-tracks-me' browser, from there once you have a use case which you would like to preserve a little bit more privacy on, isolate your activity to a new browser environment.
- This at first could be just installing a new Browser.
- With more use cases and burden start to be a bit more smart about your isolation strategy, for example look for Browsers that allow you to setup isolated browser containers through profiles
My current strategy consist of using extra Brave Browser profiles for dedicated use cases such as Airdrops, Exchanges, XXX and Extensions/Plugins with sometimes only 1 extension per profile.
Related Reading
- Surfing the net a bit more securely
- Zerologon vulnerability exploitation on the rise
- Firefox bug allows hijacking mobile browsers
- Zerologon Vulnerability
- Tronlink Wallet uses weak encryption