Privacy

33482 readers

271 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

116

My experiences with Pi-hole (scribe.disroot.org)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

48 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Pi-hole has helped improve my "relationship" with Firefox, or better phrased with Firefox forks like LibreWolf and Tor browser. Cool thing with Pi-hole is that you can watch the query log and see what happened in the background while you were surfing the Internet. I learned that :

After removing the sponsored shortcuts in Firefox and putting your own shortcuts there Firefox will make connections each time you start the browser. So, if you would have icons on your quick start page in Firefox for let's say EFF, Lemmy, Mastodon, HackerNews, with each Firefox start up, it would query these sites. which I didn't like so much. Since then I've gone back to a complete blank start page, removing search and all those quick start icons, using just toolbar folders with bookmarks.
Pi-hole defaults to blocking telemetry for Firefox and Thunderbird.
Signal uses Google servers I saw via Pi-hole. I thought that they were using Amazon servers, but looking at Wikipedia for the history of Signal hosting I learned that Signal went back to Google for hosting.
Firefox push notification services are hosted on Google servers. LibreWolf removes a lot of Google things that Firefox has by default, but not the push parts. With Pi-hole it is very easy to block that.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

on my firefox those are all favicons. when you say that "they" phone home, what's happening is that the browser is requesting the favicon for the sponsored links so it shows the right mini logo above the name of the website. if you want to disable this behavior, you can simply disable sponsored links with the gear menu in the top right corner.

if you want to disable all favicons, disable browser.chrome.favicons (old?) and/or browser.chrome.site_icons and browser.shell.shortcutFavicons in about:config, clear your cache and restart.

i'm pretty sure that firefox pulls favicons from cache for favorites or recents or whatever, but i haven't checked.