🏄‍♀️ How I Surf the World Wide Web 🕷

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Timebomb, by Kylie Minogue. 🎵

I was at a party last Sunday with some great people, and I cynically mentioned that we're all hacked and the internet is shit (I was thinking about how iPhones have been hacked and quietly sending passwords home for years, which is sad because iPhones are the best widely-available consumer-grade device, all things considered). A bright lawyer friend acknowledged and could even relate to my cynicism, but implored everyone to do what they can to maintain their data privacy; and to not stop caring and stop taking precautions.

Then we got to talking about how to mitigate harm, and folks, it was like asking me if I've seen a road with so much dust and sand.

We had a great chat and follow-ups were sent; here's an adapted email about my browsing habits. Also! I still "browse the web." The title of the post is a throwback to the funny way we talked about being on the Internet when that was what everyone did, instead of, like, opening the same 3 apps and scrolling. The web! It used to be a thing!

Pablo's (adapted) web browsing email to friend

Pi-hole is software that's meant to run on a Raspberry Pi, a tiny, very cheap computer (like, $30-$50) that you can then connect to your router to block all ads on your WiFi. I got it working and joke that our apartment has "vegan Internet." If you're not someone who builds computers, messes with your router much, or runs software from the command-line, it's not easy, but it's not the hardest thing I've done either.

Setting up the Pi in June

This tech blogger wrote up a decent article about it, though he (and one of my favorite articles on advertising on the web) uses a fatphobic frame to talk about it. If this is interesting to you, let me know! I can totally help you and [friend] set it up!

I also mentioned Firefox. I specifically use Firefox Quantum, which is a "release channel" that's like an advanced Beta version. It's got newer features of Firefox before they go out to general release, which means you get to experience a lot of cool stuff pretty early (it's also a lot less vetted, so it'll crash more often than the standard releases, but I haven't experienced it much).

After that, extensions! I install HTTPS Everywhere, since there's no great reason to use vanilla HTTP (the 'S' stands for Security!). I also use uBlock Origin to block ads and trackers for other WiFi, and Privacy Badger, which works a little differently and can catches a few things uBlock doesn't.

Last thing I do: In Firefox, I use Multi-Account containers, which is a fancy way of saying "Internet condom." It basically means all my Google tabs only know about each other, and all my Social tabs (Twitter) only know about each other, and all my Banking/Finance tabs only know about each other, etc… The way a lot of these sites work is to track all your activity across sites, so Facebook sees what you were browsing on Amazon, and when you visit a news site, it displays an ad based on what those two tell the news site about you, etc. This way, Amazon only knows my Amazon habits, Google doesn't know about my Seamless account, etc. This isn't a foolproof way to eliminate tracking, but it goes most of the way there.

Lastly lastly, I'm looking into joining the NYC Mesh network, a volunteer effort of a bunch of nerds, which would mean we could host our own servers, and we could get/serve Internet from someone who isn't Comcast or Verizon.

Apart from getting tracked on ads, there's also password security. You can enter your email address at haveibeenpwned.com to see which companies you have accounts with that have been breached. I've been in 12!

These things happen all the time (hey, did you use Slack in 2015?), and when it happens, a common attack is to use the password from the breach on other sites, since most people re-use the same password. So one of my breaches is XSplit, an account I made in 2011 when I wanted to steam StarCraft, and if I was using the same password for Facebook or my bank, in theory someone who bought the passwords off the black market could do me real harm.

These days, every site I'm on has its own custom password that looks like &DcEoEX1d^#5gzxm or mA^c**HF7cESgj!d. I store my passwords in LastPass, and when a new site asks for a login, I use their password generator to make a new hard-to-guess one. 1Password is another great offering. It's an extra step when signing up, and an extra step when logging in (I have to copy + paste whatever that site's password is), but again, it keeps me safe from the worst of it.

(also, do you know how many sites need a password? LastPass is storing 154 credentials for me!)

I am easily fingerprinted, however.

This is all overkill for most people, and I invite anyone in the comments to tell me what I might be missing. This also, paradoxically, makes me pretty susceptible to browser fingerprinting, since my habits are far from the norm.

If you're feeling like having some fun, I invite you to try Track THIS!, which does something of the opposite: it'll open 100 or so tabs without tracking to throw ad collectors off your scent, and make them think you're one of a few stock characters.

If I were really into this, I might try browsing through TOR or setting up my own VPN and browsing through that, but there are new risks those expose that I can't say I care enough about to mitigate either.