What Browser to Use? About Browser Isolation

a frequently asked question on my channel is which browser should i use and i never give a straight answer other than all and i don't think people really understand what i mean there has to be a purpose to changing browsers other than choosing it because you like the way it looks so in this video we'll first discuss the reasons why browser should be a concern and you will also discover that certain browsers are good for particular purposes the main takeaway will be that i will teach you a privacy technique that uses multiple browsers and this technique will handle the threats that i will explain shortly i've used this technique for many years and i publicly named it browser isolation for the last six years so sit tight and you will learn something new and that can have a huge impact on protecting your privacy [Music] i post my videos ahead of youtube on odyssey which is a platform from library i think it's good to have an insurance policy in case i get targeted and get cut out so follow me there using the link in the description you can also join us in my platform brax dot me where you can meet many of my subscribers and followers lately a common word used when it comes to privacy is how to fight trackers on a browser trackers are in reference to tracker cookies so there's often a desire to add the latest ad blocker or some browser extension in order to disable tracker cookies people also promote the use of certain browsers like brave or firefox because they feel that these browsers do a better job of blocking these tracker cookies than other browsers and this pretty much sums up the choices when it comes to browsers either you like the way it looks or you like what you perceive to be a privacy benefit from tracker blocking the problem folks is that most people don't completely understand the privacy threat with browsers and in my estimation are often feeling overconfident that they are protected based on a browser choice but they continue to be tracked and not necessarily by track or cookies the biggest source of tracking on the internet is tracking your usage of your browser this will result in third parties knowing which websites you visit and what you're clicking on and then through some ai you will be identified as being a particular person doing these things on the internet on top of that we also have google tracking your search activity on the search engine so you're confronted with so many threats and the solutions are not simple if you look at your google activity in google activity controls it will really magnify the effect of what i'm talking about now i've turned off tracking for myself but if you have left it on you might be in for a shock they track everything the reason solutions are not simple is because the problem is badly defined the threat is not a tracker cookie i'm a bit tired of this term because it is often posted on my video comments a tracker is discovered because there's a cookie and the cookie then is left with a little id that identifies who you are but what is not mentioned is that cookies are so old school nowadays the actual tracking is invisible and is done by browser fingerprinting a browser fingerprint can uniquely identify you even without an ip address or even a cookie i have a little test program that i wrote where you can find your browser fingerprint go to this site braxtme geo based on your current browser it will come up with a unique hash value which can then be unique to you it doesn't have to be stored in a cookie but a website can just run the code i have there and see that you've been seen before that can then be matched to other identifiers like your currently logged in username here in this browser fingerprint test you will see the different characteristics used to determine who you are now here's the funny part the more you try to protect yourself by turning off javascript using privacy badger using ad blockers turning off cookies and so on you're actually making your browser more unique and more trackable without using cookies because of gdpr in the eu you now have to deal with websites prodding you to accept cookies and builds on cookies and cookie trackers as being important when in fact newer techniques may be enhanced by cookies but are not tied to them here's the other consequence of being ultra conscious of ad tracking you start blocking javascript and cookies at the expense of usability suddenly your browser becomes very hard to use because so many websites break eventually you just give up with the aggressive site blocking and you're back to being open again and also back to being frustrated so today i will simplify this job for you by understanding the actual threat and taking simple precautions preventing browser fingerprinting from being a privacy issue is not too difficult but i only trust my way i have done extensive testing with the various methods of behavior in various browsers and checking the fingerprint using my tool and most are still vulnerable so let's underline the threat clearly before we go on the actual threat is not the trackers as so many security people call them but the actual process of browser fingerprinting browser fingerprinting is the threat browser fingerprinting may or may not use tracker cookies now how does browser fingerprinting become a thread actually this is often not understood as well fingerprinting a single device is of no specific value to a data miner the fingerprint data only makes sense if used in a large scale and this means that for any data to be useful the majority of websites need to have the capability to do browser fingerprinting into the same database well this is starting to get simple here the reality is there are only two companies with the reach to make browser fingerprinting deadly as a data collector these companies are google and facebook this is important to understand the reason google and facebook have accumulated so much knowledge of our behavior is because in practically all websites the website owner has allowed google and facebook to insert itself as a little website within the big website in the case of facebook this is the facebook like button because each website owner wants to get the social media likes on their site they insert the facebook code so facebook.com actually runs inside every facebook like button considering that most websites have this you can see now how you can tell where you've been in the case of google it's even worse everyone wants their page to be searchable on google search the only way they can do search engine optimization is by inserting google in the form of google analytics on every website and then google and facebook tie into the advertising that's built into the sites to get monetized the windows are placed in websites which are actually portals for google to sell the space and both google and facebook have a little trick up their sleeve when it comes to identifying you on chrome the browser keeps you logged in to your google id on facebook it knows who you are based on your facebook login or it will know it the next time you log in just imagine what happens here anytime you go to a website with an embedded facebook or google your browser fingerprint and your activity will be logged by facebook and google then the next time you log in they can easily verify that the same fingerprint is the same and all the activity will then be put under your account so just to make it clear in my mind these two companies are the biggest threat in the browser fingerprinting world since these are the only two companies that have the scale to make every website follow their whim and from our behavior with google login and facebook login they can arrive at an absolute identity just to give you an idea of how this information is used as a website owner i can go to google analytics and analyze the traffic by age gender location and what interests the people have of those coming in and they know precisely what each person does on the internet they have a lot of detailed history of the activities of each person and it is basically indexed to the google id and the facebook id now let's stretch your intellectual reasoning here for a little bit so you understand my logic what would happen if you never log into google or facebook on your browser what happens is that google and facebook don't have a permanent identity to attach to your web history so you just become person a and person b what happens if you never go to a google and facebook on a browser well then it would appear to google and facebook that you don't have a google account or facebook account so you are no longer an interesting person for ad targeting remember that ad targeting today can be used for any kind of message starting tomorrow so this is not just about ad the problem is that it is probably difficult for most of you not to have a google account the majority of people use gmail and youtube is the second largest search engine in the world plus all the google services that many of you want to use and here i am using youtube as you can see and some of you persist in sticking with facebook even though this is the biggest evil in the world and identifies you with a real name the assumption then in my technique of browser isolation is to isolate these two players the bad guys google and facebook even though google says don't do evil now i have no facebook so i don't bother with that although i will be talking about specific browsers here in a moment please understand that this technique will work with any set of browsers you choose i will just tell you which ones i use what i do folks is use google and everything google on a single browser you can use chrome or a better one might be brave google works well with chrome since it makes chrome it keeps you logged in and is convenient for chrome the reason brave is also usable is because brave is based on chromium so it is very similar to chrome which is also based on chromium in fact the signature given by brave is that it appears to be chrome when i do google on this browser i don't really have to worry about whether i log out i don't have to worry about cookies i don't really have to worry about identity since it already knows who i am by my google id i do youtube too on this browser the reason i don't have to worry is because google already knows what it knows anyway i'm not giving it more data in hiding it doesn't help since they have a history on each platform that they own i do pause all the tracking on google activity controls but still i don't have to trust them to do that but as far as google is concerned i don't appear to be visiting any other website other than google properties this is because i never go to any other site on that browser so google doesn't know if i buy anything from amazon or ebay or if i use paypal or which new site i go to all it knows is what's in the google circle which is youtube gmail google search google earth google maps and so on in my case i am conscious of what goes into my gmail and i don't use google search i use duckduckgo so i have already limited that search data google will undoubtedly browser fingerprint chrome and have my identity but it doesn't matter since i never go to any site that gives them data now let's go to my second browser which in my case will be firefox and again choose whatever you want on this browser give yourself a firm rule do not log into anything google in my case i do all my other web browsing on firefox this includes things like amazon ebay paypal news sites etc these websites do not have a global tracking infrastructure so they can't cross-check each other on firefox now you can get more sophisticated and separate out financial websites into one browser political sites and another browser and so on i didn't do that because i understand that only google and facebook can really make sense out of that data now what about facebook again i hate giving this advice because it encourages you to stay on facebook which i keep stating as the biggest zucking threat to privacy find another browser that you can isolate facebook in if you didn't use brave for google and you can use it for facebook brave is a good choice because it can auto block the facebook cookies although like i said that's just a temporary thing and it can still track you or fingerprint you without the cookies but just to caution your facebook includes instagram so if you're going to use it on a browser keep them together now think about what you did here as far as a browser isolated facebook is concerned you do not appear to be visiting any other websites so it has no extra information to take from you other than what you upload in your post and what your family and friends are adding to your data without your consent and all those pictures with your location data only those does this make facebook safe no but at least it denies them access to your web browsing history how do i keep this organized so you get used to the setup of multiple browsers what i do is on each browser i turn on my favorites bar for all the sites i visit on each browser so on my google browser i have youtube and google play store and google earth and such things this reminds me when i launch the browser what the purpose of the browser is it keeps me from making a mistake then i have a mixed list of websites bookmark on my firefox browser and again reminding me that this is my general purpose browser with no google stuff on it now to prove my anonymity to the browser fingerprint the browser should look as plain vanilla as possible i make sure to remove all extensions no privacy badger no ad blockers and so on although to be honest this may not matter on the google browser since you're already logged in anyway so i don't really care if you add extensions to the google one by the way i do my ad blocking at the dns level using pi hole so if you can install a pi hole server you can do that if you have my vpn bytes vpn pi hole is automatically included so you're covered do not do ad blocking at the browser level do not have settings like disabling javascript or set your browser to be very restrictive it's not needed again the more you customize your browser the more accurate the device fingerprint is leave the browser as plain as can be at least on the firefox one but you don't have to worry about favorites that doesn't get seen by the way the way i have it set with my one browser logged in google knows who i am so this may be an opportunity to feed it this information if you want you can go to your google dedicated browser and visit websites just to make google think you believe something different like political science opposite to what you believe i've never spent time doing that but hey it's an idea i've been using this technique for many years six years now and it's pretty flawless i've heard of various partitioning techniques on brave and firefox to isolate sessions isolating sessions will isolate the cookies but because you're still on the same browser you will have the same fingerprint again use my browser fingerprinting test tool on braxtme geo to fully understand how a browser will be identified browser isolation is the way to go usually i don't need more than three browsers depending on what you want to separate out with your activities and you can do this same technique on a phone although if the phone isn't de-googled you will be identified anyway by a device fingerprint so on a phone take the steps to eliminate the device fingerprint get a d google phone i'll give you some extra bonus tips if you've got this far first do not use auto fill or save passwords use a real password manager and don't rely on the browser for that these can leak your identity second tip if you screwed up and think you're done for life don't worry just erase your browsing history and cookies and start fresh you can temporarily make your browser different in little ways like changing your time zone your screen resolution and use that for a little while and the history about you will eventually get messed up i hope i gave you helpful information and if you want more of this please subscribe to this channel and hit that notification bell i have so much information here and it takes a while to get the full picture thanks again to my patreon supporters and those who buy my products the links for both are in the description this channel does not survive from youtube ads so it really needs your help to keep it going see you next time

Channel: Rob Braxman Tech

Views: 130,488

Keywords: internet privacy, privacy, tech privacy, internet privacy guy, best web browser 2020, best web browser for privacy, browser fingeprinting, trackers, cookies spying, tracker cookies, device fingerprinting, cybersecurity, google activity controls, brave browser privacy, firefox browser privacy, chrome privacy, chrome vs chromium, stop ad tracking, web browser, facebook tracking, google tracking

Id: 9z3_Em4S99g

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020