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Website privacy grade

FollowingHim

FollowingHim

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If you have the DuckDuckGo browser extension, you may notice that in your toolbar it gives websites a rating of how private they are.

This forum has a B+ privacy rating. This is very, very good, almost no websites achieve an A. It's almost the top rating available.

The rating tests four things. We achieve such a good rating because we have:
  • Encrypted connection
  • No trackers found
  • No major tracking networks found
  • but have "Unknown privacy practices"
We only fail to get an A because we haven't told DuckDuckGo what our privacy practices actually are. That's the same for almost every website on the internet.

By comparison
  • BBC.com: C+ rating. 7 trackers found, including Google.
  • google.com and youtube.com: C+ rating. Bad privacy practices.
  • RT.com: C+ rating. 9 trackers found, including Google.
  • stuff.co.nz: D rating. 17 trackers found, including Google.
  • foxnews.com: C rating. 12 trackers found, including Google
  • cnn.com: D rating. 35 trackers found, including Google and Twitter.
  • trunews.com: B+ rating. 0 trackers, just "unknown privacy practices" like this forum.
We're in good company!

Note that the extension itself will block all those trackers, and upgrade all the above websites (except google and youtube) to a B+ rating automatically. But by default, we beat basically every website on the internet.
 
Incidentally, if you don't want to be tracked around the internet, either:
  • Use the Brave browser. It's basically Chrome, with Google removed, and all tracking and advertisements actively blocked unless you specifically allow it. It also loads pages much faster, and they look cleaner, because it doesn't load all that rubbish.
  • Install the DuckDuckGo browser extension. This tries to achieve a similar level of protection, but from within your existing browser.
Or if you're really serious, use Brave with the DuckDuckGo extension installed, for two layers of protection...
 
Last edited:
FollowingHim said:
Incidentally, if you don't want to be tracked around the internet, either:
  • Use the Brave browser. It's basically Chrome, with Google removed, and all tracking and advertisements actively blocked unless you specifically allow it. It also loads pages much faster, and they look cleaner, because it doesn't load all that rubbish.
  • Install the DuckDuckGo browser extension. This tries to achieve a similar level of protection, but from within your existing browser.
Or if you're really serious, use Brave with the DuckDuckGo extension installed, for two layers of protection...
Click to expand...
Great recommendation, @FollowingHim! That's the exact configuration I use: DuckDuckGo with Brave.
 
I have just made a tweak to signature permissions, because I realised that a security setting was not working as anticipated. It is working now.

I have disallowed images from signatures (I thought this was already the case but hadn't ticked all the necessary boxes). The reason for this is to avoid trackers.

Images are pulled from other websites at the time the page is loaded. The site that the image is pulled from may easily track the IP address and other details of people who access that image. This is how Facebook trackers work - they are a tiny image file which is loaded whenever a page is loaded. You may see it (the facebook thumbs-up button that appears all over the internet is an example), or it may be a single pixel and invisible. With that image on the page, anybody that visits the page may be tracked by the person who owns the image. That's why we don't have Facebook thumbs-up buttons on this site (we instead have a native facebook share link that does not include a tracker image).

If somebody wanted to keep track of visitors to this website, it would be quite simple to stick a little tracking image into a signature, and suddenly you'd have a tracking image embedded in pages all over the site, wherever that person had posted. This person would be able to then glean a large amount of information about the people who are visiting this website. Images in signatures are therefore a large privacy risk, as they could allow a third-party to insert tracking scripts across this website without the notice of the forum staff or users. Images in regular posts are also a security risk, but a smaller one - you'd have to insert them in every post individually, so it's far less practical to put them in enough places to collect a lot of information.

The balance between privacy and usability that I believed I had set was to allow images in posts, but disallow them from signatures. Unfortunately I hadn't ticked all the boxes and this wasn't entirely working. I have now fully disallowed them from signatures also. Sorry to the tiny handful of people who have put up a signature image during the time that this was accidentally permitted.
 
FollowingHim said:
I have just made a tweak to signature permissions, because I realised that a security setting was not working as anticipated. It is working now.

I have disallowed images from signatures (I thought this was already the case but hadn't ticked all the necessary boxes). The reason for this is to avoid trackers.

Images are pulled from other websites at the time the page is loaded. The site that the image is pulled from may easily track the IP address and other details of people who access that image. This is how Facebook trackers work - they are a tiny image file which is loaded whenever a page is loaded. You may see it (the facebook thumbs-up button that appears all over the internet is an example), or it may be a single pixel and invisible. With that image on the page, anybody that visits the page may be tracked by the person who owns the image. That's why we don't have Facebook thumbs-up buttons on this site (we instead have a native facebook share link that does not include a tracker image).

If somebody wanted to keep track of visitors to this website, it would be quite simple to stick a little tracking image into a signature, and suddenly you'd have a tracking image embedded in pages all over the site, wherever that person had posted. This person would be able to then glean a large amount of information about the people who are visiting this website. Images in signatures are therefore a large privacy risk, as they could allow a third-party to insert tracking scripts across this website without the notice of the forum staff or users. Images in regular posts are also a security risk, but a smaller one - you'd have to insert them in every post individually, so it's far less practical to put them in enough places to collect a lot of information.

The balance between privacy and usability that I believed I had set was to allow images in posts, but disallow them from signatures. Unfortunately I hadn't ticked all the boxes and this wasn't entirely working. I have now fully disallowed them from signatures also. Sorry to the tiny handful of people who have put up a signature image during the time that this was accidentally permitted.
Click to expand...
Wahoo. You rock!
 
@FollowingHim we really appreciate all the hard work and dedication you do/have for this site!! Thank you very much!!
 
This kind of speechifying is over my head further than Greek. As such, I really appreciate it!
 
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