Why Firefox is the best browser for privacy and how to configure things properly (see change log)

guys son here this is episode number two of the privacy guides in last episode we discussed how to configure Mac OS to make it more private and in this episode I'm gonna discuss with you guys why I switched from Chrome to Firefox and why I believe you should do the same if you haven't already quick note chrome is developed by Google Google is an advertising company Google is known to invade people's privacy in order to learn more about what they're into to target them with ads and as Edward Snowden revealed the NSA and other security agencies have direct access to the Google data set therefore when you use Google you're sharing whatever you do on the web with a whole bunch of people so I highly recommend using Firefox Firefox is an open-source project it's developed by a community of people who believe in privacy and freedom of speech and the Firefox development is funded by the Mozilla Foundation which is a non-profit now unfortunately or fortunately a huge part of the Mozilla funding comes from Google but that's so that Google is a default search engine and that's something we can fix quite quickly so without further ado let's jump into this guide now the first thing you want to do is open up Safari and search for Firefox now mozilla.org that's great you click on download Firefox and you go ahead and download it now that part is a little boring I am sorry in one minute we'll be into the settings so you want to open this up click on Firefox I don't know why I'm coming dating comment ating this I mean let's meditate okay we drag-and-drop Firefox into the application folder and once this is done we're almost there okay so we're now in Firefox a few things we're gonna start by closing this and ejecting the Installer and now we want to drag Firefox in place of Safari quit Safari and remove it from the dock as we will no longer be using Safari yes okay as I mentioned earlier if we close those little windows you'll notice that Google is a default search engine that's something that we're gonna fix quite quickly let's start by opening up the Preferences I'm gonna be walking you through all of those five tabs on the left this video might take a little bit of time but bear with me it's worth every minute of your time so first things first Firefox is not your default browser we want to go ahead and make Firefox our default browser look yes now nothing is very important from a privacy standpoint and all of this except for network settings if you go into network settings you want to make sure you enable DNS over HTTP I think this merits its own episode I'll discuss what DNS is in that episode for the time being what that means is when your browser is trying to query domain name services probably that's Chinese to you again I'll discuss this in another episode but it essentially how can I simplify this okay when you go on a website say you go on San Vincente calm your browser needs to know what the address IP of San Nutan calm is in order to resolve it and go and fetch the information from the server this process until quite recently was done in clear text meaning anyone between you and the DNS server could know that you're trying to figure out what the IP address is for is for Sun Newton calm and that is allowing your internet service provider or your government to know that you're interested in whatever it is on sunnites and not calm now that may be totally fine if it you're going on Facebook it might not be that great if you're going on to freedom of speech websites or things like that that reveal some of the opinions you have and stuff like this so enabling DNS over HTTP is a great way of mitigating that okay now moving on to home this is kind of like personal things this is not that doesn't have to do with privacy but when we open in Utah there's a whole bunch of stuff going on here I tend to remove top sites recommended by pocket highlights and snippets so that I now have a clean page here while we're at it I tend to remove this and this and we'll discuss this one in a second Firefox account okay so moving on to search well the default search engine as I mentioned earlier is Google we want to switch this to DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo is a search engine similar to Google but it doesn't correlate all of your searches to your identity which is fantastic for your privacy I recommend not enabling search suggestions the reason for that is when you open a tab and you just copy/paste something into the address bar it's not gonna try to search for results right away it's gonna wait for you to press Enter so if you paste a password by mistake in here and type it's not gonna submit a search you know submitting your password to DuckDuckGo so that's really a privacy thing now in one click search engines I remove everything except DuckDuckGo and we're done now moving on to the most important tab of them.all privacy and security I recommend using custom and disabling all third-party cookies now as this says here it might break some websites in my experience very few websites are broken the ones that break tend to be websites that are very intrusive from a privacy standpoint so that's good so we don't go ahead and reload all tabs now send websites I do not tract signal I recommend always enabling to do not track signal it's not a standard that a lot of websites follow unfortunately but the intentions are good and there's nothing we can lose by enabling it cookies and site data the way I set up my Firefox is that when Firefox is closed all cookies and site data is deleted that means that if ever I close Firefox and go through customs or whatever and someone forces me to open my computer all of my browsing history is not accessible because it's being deleted now that also means that all the websites you've logged into well you won't be logged in anymore and the so that can be a little frustrating but I think that the gains like the security and privacy gains outweighed loss so I would really recommend enabling this logins and passwords I personally recommend disabling all of this I recommend using a password manager like a standalone password manager to manage all of your passwords versus relying on Firefox to do that in the context of Firefox so I recommend not enabling this now your history I mentioned earlier that you don't want when you're going through customs or if someone seizes your computer or if someone like a hacker wants to learn more about your habits you don't want your history to be available when you close Firefox so I recommend going to custom and making sure clear history when Firefox closes is enabled now moving on this is okay Firefox data collection and use I recommend disabling everything although Firefox is a good actor in the privacy space I still don't want my browser to be uploading stuff to Firefox like crash reports and things like that okay so we're done now that last tab is an interesting one Firefox has developed a pretty elegant solution to synchronizing your preferences bookmarks and stuff like this between different of your browsers that wasn't great English but anyways so if you have Firefox on your smart phone and you have Firefox on your desktop it's a way to synchronize that across your devices that may sound appealing at first my suggestion is to really try to remain to retain as much of our sovereignty as possible so I recommend not doing that for a bunch of reasons that are too long to explain here but the short story is this is very private the stuff you browse is very private even though it's encrypted on your computer before being sent to Firefox I recommend I highly recommend not enabling sync and as a matter of fact to make sure that we never enable it there's a neat little thing that we can do using Firefox advanced configuration and that is okay this says proceed with caution like don't go ahead and just change anything here you're going to completely break Firefox but that specific one identity FX accounts that enabled is true if you put that to false and then quit Firefox when you reopen it and go to preferences that tab is gone and the little icon here is gone so I highly recommend doing that now there are a few extensions that I always install one of them is privacy badger so privacy badger is an extension that detects all the trackers are trying to track you across the web and it disables them it's not an ad blocker and I'm personally I'm against ad blockers I think people that create content on the web they need to earn a living and in order to do so unfortunately people are not willing to pay for content these days so they have to monetize through advertising now if done if done well that's perfectly fine what's not fine is how Google tries to track you across multiple websites and profile you and stuff like this to retarget you privacy badger takes care of or at least part of it so we want to add that and I personally allow it when I'm in private mode because I want to make sure that even in private mode I'm not tracked another one that I always enable is HTTPS Everywhere and I also want to allow it in private mode and then if you go here you want to make sure that this is enabled that will block all unencrypted connections meaning that you're less subset susceptible to men in the middle attacks and stuff like this now one last extension that I highly recommend is whoops containers is a Firefox extension that's actually developed by the Firefox team and that extension is used to create containers for example one for Firefox one for Google that essentially compared to mentalize --is the way you use Firefox when you're in Firefox container say one for Facebook well anything within that container will be locked to the container meaning Firefox and on Firefox but Facebook cannot read cookies from outside the container so when [ __ ] I'm gonna Jesus Firefox Facebook I'm confused when Facebook tries to cross you track you across all the web sites well it will only be able to do so within the context of that container so that's really great for your privacy so I recommend adding this for sure and the last part of this guide is how to actually go about using the Firefox container system by the way the key concept here is something we call compartmentalization in the privacy and security space that is super important it will actually have its own episode later and we'll discuss things like cubes OS and using virtual machines on your computer to do separate things so if you're into this more advanced stuff smash the subscribe button we'll get to that shortly okay let's go ahead and setup containers so going through a little wizard here Oh start sinking no never enable sinking okay um I go ahead and usually delete the default containers as I don't see great value in them and I like to use my own once this is done I recommend firing up Firefox not Firefox Facebook why am i mixing those two they're like oh sorry Firefox okay yeah while we're here actually I tend to remove the pocket thing I don't know why they're pushing that so much if I click on container and I click on plus I can create a Facebook container and a sign of color blue once this is done if I open it this and I go on facebook.com actually opening this other tab was kind of useless we now see that it's the same as usual we're in Firefox but we're into the we're inside of the Facebook container and if I hit that button again the UX is a little awkward bear with me and I say always open in Firefox that means that if I open a tab that is not in open in Firefox I can do it again sorry always open in Facebook if I go here and I take type facebook.com it's gonna ask me do you want to open this site in your assigned container yes always do so open that means that even if I start going on Facebook or if I click a Facebook link when I'm not in the Facebook container it's gonna pop it open into the Facebook container so that's really really good now Facebook has other domain names the way the containers work is using domain names or host names so if you go on messenger comm which is also a Facebook property it doesn't know that you want to open that inside of Facebook so you want to click here and say oh sorry sorry sorry sorry same mistake as before you want to start by going into the Facebook container opening up messenger within the container and then you click here and say always open in facebook now I recommend doing this for Instagram as well and always open in Facebook and now what's this last one yeah whatsapp I don't even know I don't use whatsapp personally what app maybe it's not even written the right way okay here it is what's up I don't think you can actually use whatsapp using like a browser per se I think you need a native native app but you know what we'll just slap it open into Facebook as well so now that we've done that if we go ahead and type Instagram calm it's gonna ask us to open it in the fire floor at Firefox in the Facebook Jesus I'm so sorry um yeah and we're good and the same for whatsapp I don't even remember how to actually write it so I'll skip that one okay so there you have it you're now using Firefox instead of Chrome oh yeah one last little thing if you go ahead and click on toolbar toolbar sorry bookmarks toolbar this is what I actually use to register websites that I visit all the time so say website that I visit all the time is hmm which one could I opened okay reddit so say I'm a huge reddit fan and I go and read it all the time if you click on the little star here and select bookmark toolbar and say okay well reddit is now here and it's readily accessible so I personally use all of this and you can also create folders to put all of the links that I visit all the time since when I close Firefox all of the history is gone so I'll just show what that looks like if I quit Firefox here and reopen it if I go into history its blank okay so that was a pretty long episode maybe a few of you are still here with me I really recommend using Firefox versus all other browsers Firefox is also available in mobile I might create a nother video on how to configure the mobile version there's a lot less settings that we can actually play with but if that's something that you're interested in you can put a comment and I'll consider doing an episode on that I think we're good you now have a really private Firefox congratulations alright I'll see you in the next episode bye bye

Channel: Sun Knudsen

Views: 425,830

Keywords: Privacy, Security, macOS, Firefox, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, Firefox Multi-Account Containers

Id: NH4DdXC0RFw

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020