Many distros are better than ubuntu nowdays. PopOS happens to be one of those

Welcome!

No, I use my devices for different purposes and I don’t have any interest in them communicating

Neo launcher

Privacy redirect has been discontinued for years, I strongly suggest using libredirect

This is very useful actually, how did you get those?

Play store is preinstalled on billions of devices, F-Droid is only used by a bunch of (very based) nerds.

Google is most definitely not scared of F-Droid

Newpipe is in active development and just updated a few days ago, they just have a slow release schedule.

I use tubular and it’s great, but Tubular itself is still subject to newpipe’s release cycle.

Not sure why people started thinking newpipe is unmantained, this is the second time I hear it here on Lemmy

Absolutely agree. It’s counterintuitive, but waking up earlier than you need to and start your day slowly actually makes you feel more rested and calm (provided you’ve still slept sufficiently)

Kaspersky has faced controversy over allegations that it has engaged with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)—ties which the company has actively denied. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security banned Kaspersky products from all government departments on September 13, 2017. In October 2017, subsequent reports alleged that hackers working for the Russian government stole confidential data from the home computer of an American National Security Agency contractor via Kaspersky antivirus software. Kaspersky denied the allegations, reporting that the software had detected Equation Group malware samples which it uploaded to its servers for analysis in its normal course of operation.[13] The company has since announced commitments to increased accountability, such as soliciting independent reviews and verification of its software’s source code, and announcing that it would migrate some of its core infrastructure for foreign customers from Russia to Switzerland. In November 2020, Kaspersky finished relocating the data of its customers from Russia to Switzerland.[14][15] The company has also opened multiple transparency centers in Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, Spain and Malaysia which allow state agencies, government experts and regulators to review its source code.[16][17]

I agree and I also support the “common sense is the best av” argument, but for less tech savy people and workplaces I do think it’s necessary to have a last hope safety net against malware

Cookies (3rd and 1st party) can be disabled per site from your browser settings in any modern browser.

JS can be disabled per site using uBlock origin for sure, and I’m pretty sure you can disable iframes as well

I admit I’ve never used uMatrix, but from what I know ublock is the successor of the project (and is considered the state-of-the-art adblocking software), so I’d assume you can do everything uMatrix can and more.

I suggest looking up some tutorials for uBlock to get the grasp of the possibility of the software

I was curious whether some scandal about data being sent to russian govt had emerged after the war, but apparently things are as they used to be.

Mind you, AVs have a scary control over your system, and I totally respect not wanting to use one headquartered in Russia (and since the government security agencies have ties within those companies even in the “free world” (lmao) it’s safe to assume Russian govt has them inside Kaspersky too).

With that being said, kaspersky is actually a multinational corporation present in many areas of the world, I wonder how much influence Moscow actuallt has over them.

Source?

Because you need people to build a community, and like it or not, most people are on discord

There are other reasons but I think this is the main one

No problem, glad I could help!

Tbh vanilla Firefox + uBlock configured as advised in that user.js wiki page linked above is more than enough.

Librewolf is preferred but it’s something you need to follow and be aware of. It’s an indiependent fork of a browser, and as such you really don’t want it to be discontinued without you noticing.

Which is why I would advise librewolf over Firefox only if you know you’ll stay updated about the privacy “scene”, if you’re setting it up on someone else’s computer, on a work device or you just want a “set it and forget it approach”, definitely go with vanilla Firefox. Again, 80/20 rule.

About Arkenfox’s user.js I remember reading it was meant to be a starting point, not to be used as it is provided but to be customized for it to suit your needs.

Personally I always thought it was not worth to invest the time, but I guess it’s a good learning experience if you’re interested in it.

Most of the “privacy” extensions do little to nothing to protecy your privacy as of today, due to them either being abandoned, replaced by features integrated in ublock origin or just not relevant anymore because of the actual fingerprinting strategies employed at the current time.

And it is not “random uhh acktshually🤓 lemmy user” who’s saying this, but the wiki section of the arkenfox user.js project. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions

Installing them only expands the attack surface of your browser, consumes resources and makes you more fingerprintable.

They are remnants of a time when you needed a full day and a degree in CS to properly set Firefox for privacy. Luckily, things are more straightforward nowdays.

Temporary containers:

TC is no longer maintained. While TC provides sanitizing, and uses a dFPI-compatible API, this is not why it is recommended as optional […]

️Sanitizing in-session is a false sense of privacy. They do nothing for IP tracking. Even Tor Browser does not sanitize in-session e.g. when you request a new circuit. A new ID requires both full sanitizing and a new IP. The same applies to Firefox.

uMatrix:

No longer maintained, the last release was Sept 2019 except for a one-off patch to fix a vulnerability Everything uMatrix did can be covered by prefs or other extensions: use uBlock Origin for any content blocking.

ClearURLs:

Redundant with uBlock Origin’s removeparam and added lists. Any potential extra coverage provided by additional extensions is going to be minimal

LocalCDN:

Third parties are already partitioned if you use Total Cookie Protection (dFPI)

Replacing some version specific scripts on CDNs with local versions is not a comprehensive solution and is a form of enumerating badness. While it may work with some scripts that are included it doesn’t help with most other third party connections

CDN extensions don’t really improve privacy as far as sharing your IP address is concerned and their usage is fingerprintable as this Tor Project developer points out. They are the wrong tool for the job and are not a substitute for a good VPN or Tor Browser. Its worth noting the resources for Decentraleyes are over three years out of date and would not likely be used anyway

Cookie autodelete

Sanitizing in-session is a false sense of privacy. They do nothing for IP tracking. Even Tor Browser does not sanitize in-session e.g. when you request a new circuit. A new ID requires both full sanitizing and a new IP. The same applies to Firefox

Cookie extensions can lack APIs or implementation of them to properly sanitize e.g. at the time of writing: Cookie Auto Delete

As of Firefox 86, strict mode is not supported at this time due to missing APIs to handle the Total Cookie Protection

Consent-o-matic:

No user.js reference here, but I expressed my doubts about it in the comments yesterday https://feddit.it/comment/6471917

Bypass paywalls clean:

While it’s amazing, it’s also available as a filter list, from the same author

In short, don’t bother with more extensions. Just add ublock filters when/if needed, but this is one case where you get 80% of the result with 20% of the effort (FF strict privacy protection mode, ublock origin, switch search engine)

Also, weirdly enough, nobody mentioned the bitwarden extension. Thanks to that (but not only), they manage to provide an amazing password manager service for free, the paid options are cheap, it’s full featured, well integrated with the browser, open source and self hostable.

Ublock with the annoyances filters enabled hides most of them perfectly, and if the website uses some obscure toolkit/creates its own banner you can always remove it using the content selector

Hence, there is no need for the the extension mentioned in the parent comment

Doesn’t the third party cookie blocking already do this?

Unfortunately I don’t use it, so I couldn’t tell you

Glad to have helped anyways