SnowHaze – SnowHaze

Set SnowHaze as Default iOS Browser

Yvan — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 09:37:00 +0000

Safari has always been the default browser on your iPhone and iPad, meaning that all links you click on will be opened in Safari. Since the launch of iOS 14 in September 2020, Apple lets you choose your preferred default browser.

We are very excited about this new feature because it removes a crucial deficiency in you daily privacy routine. Take for example a marketing email with a link in it. By default it would open in Safari, exposing you to all the trackers and unique identifiers of the visited site. This would not happen when opening the same link in SnowHaze, since trackers are blocked and identifiers are stripped from the URL.

Let’s go through three simple steps to change your default browser to SnowHaze:

1. Open the iOS Settings and scroll down to SnowHaze.

2. Click on “Default Browser App”.

3. Select “SnowHaze”

Congratulations! From now on every link will open in SnowHaze and you can relax knowing that you personal data is safe.

Coming soon, the first VPN on all platforms with privacy by design: Zero-Knowledge Auth 2.0

Jan — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 14:16:55 +0000

There was clearly no need for another VPN provider when we launched SnowHaze VPN back in 2017. Why did we do it then? At first, we just wanted to partner with a VPN provider to offer an all in one solution for your online privacy. However, while there is a staggering number of VPN providers around, none of them have provided the privacy and security we were looking for. Specifically, we were looking for a VPN offering privacy by design – some guarantee that the provider keeps the claims made. We were not able to find one. That’s when we decided to create SnowHaze VPN – the first VPN with privacy by design thanks to Zero-Knowledge Auth.

We are thrilled to announce that we have worked hard to extend Zero-Knowledge Auth and make it even better for everybody. By the end of this year we will release Zero-Knowledge Auth 2.0 and with this the most private VPN solution for all platforms.

But wait, what is privacy by design and what is Zero-Knowledge Auth? Why the hell should I care? Read on to find out.

Privacy by design

Since your entire internet traffic is rerouted through a VPN, your VPN provider now is your single point of failure. Apparently, the VPN provider has to be trustworthy and handle your data with uttermost care. Accordingly, most VPN providers usually claim to be the safest, no-log, most private, … provider ever. Often located in poorly regulated countries, owned by undisclosed people, participating in dubious business practices, and with no way of proving the (big) claims made, VPN providers have a hard time keeping up to the level of trust needed.

SnowHaze VPN is different as we are the only VPN provider to offer privacy by design. This essentially means that there is no technical way of identifying our users. Your privacy is not only our policy but our only option, as it is not possible for us to track you. We named the underlying process Zero-Knowledge Auth. The protection delivered by Zero-Knowledge Auth is essentially based on the fact, that every user gets the same access token, thus disabling us from distinguishing our users. Here are the exact specifications of Zero-Knowledge Auth.

Zero-Knowledge Auth 2.0

With Zero-Knowledge Auth 2.0 we had to go even a step further, as we were currently limited to a single platform. However, with our Android version coming up and a planned extension of our VPN to all platforms, something new was needed. We had the following requirements:

Privacy by design – We should not be able to track you
No disclosure – Nothing can be compromised if a third party/government gets server access
No user accounts – You should not have to sign up and have an account with us
Easy to transfer – You should be able to use your subscription on all your devices, without us knowing about these devices or without the need of an account
Fraud protection – We should be protected from passing on the subscription and resulting overuse
Anonymous payment methods – It should be possible to pay anonymously and with cryptocurrencies
Money-back guarantee – unsatisfied customers should get their money back quickly

Although these requirements seem to be hard to fulfill, we are currently patenting Zero-Knowledge Auth 2.0 that will achieve precisely this. It’s primarily based on cryptography, and the technical details will follow soon.

Summary

With Zero-Knowledge Auth 2.0 we will be able to offer a VPN service with privacy by design. The VPN will be available on all platforms and will require no user account. Still, you can use all your devices with a single subscription. You can pay anonymously using cash or cryptocurrencies, and there will be a 100% money back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with our service!

We are currently in the process of filing a patent for Zero-Knowledge Auth 2.0 and will release technical details and the entire source code, too. Although there was no need for yet another (standard) VPN provider, we firmly believe that with Zero-Knowledge Auth we can bring something fresh and new to the industry! Please let us know what you think on Wire, email or sign-up for our newsletter!

We do not track our users because we hate tracking: that means we also need your help to tell us what you like and dislike about SnowHaze, so please do reach out!

Happy 1 year SnowHaze VPN!

Yvan — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 14:56:17 +0000

SnowHaze has been out here for 1 year now. It’s time to take a look back on this incredible year. SnowHaze VPN brought us a truly anonymous VPN service and a fresh wind in the VPN industry.

New in SnowHaze: Usage Statistics

Yvan — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 13:38:32 +0000

As you probably noticed, the “Home” screen in SnowHaze has changed with our latest update. Version 2.6 includes four counters above your bookmarks to visualize and quantify how SnowHaze protected you.

We all know that “seeing is believing”. Especially when it comes to the protection of our personal data, having some confirmation of the performance is important. Up to we didn’t got a summary of SnowHaze’s performance.

New view of the Home screen with the four counters.

By including the new counters, SnowHaze gives you feedback on what has been done to protect your privacy. Let me quickly introduce the different counters.

HTTPS Upgrades

SnowHaze forces pages to load through the secure and encrypted HTTPS protocol. Some pages support both the insecure HTTP and the secure HTTPS protocols. SnowHaze redirects to the secure page whenever there is one available and lets you know by counting how many times it redirected to HTTPS.

Trackers Blocked

SnowHaze blocks many different trackers from following your activities on the internet. You will notice that many sites have tens, sometimes hundreds of different trackers on them. This is the counter that will have by far the largest number. This is only an estimation though, because it is for us technically not possible to get the exact number of trackers blocked on a single site. Thus, we counted the numbers of trackers on many websites and added them to a local database. For websites not contained in that list, an average value is added to the counter.

Deleted Cookies

SnowHaze accepts cookies, but discards them as soon as the session ends or you close the tab. The third counter keeps track of the number of cookies that were deleted.

VPN Protections

The last counter counts the number of sites that were loaded through SnowHaze VPN. This counter is active if you have a SnowHaze Premium subscription. Websites loaded through both IPSec and OpenVPN connections are counted.

The counters will hopefully give you a better insight into how SnowHaze protects you day after day and motivate you to continue protecting your personal data online.

You can reset the counters to zero in the Settings → SnowHaze → Clear Usage Stats

Start making the counters explode and share your SnowHaze stats on your social media with #SnowHaze!

Share your stats on Twitter

This is why your internet experience is better without Javascript

Yvan — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 14:11:27 +0000

This is what you should know about how JavaScript shapes the way we perceive the internet; but it also works without.

Do you want to experience a new internet without annoying ads, pop-up windows urging you to subscribe, or website that endlessly scroll? You probably have felt annoyed by one of these things at some point. Wouldn’t it be great to just turn off the annoying part and keep what we all really want: the content? Well, this other kind of internet has been with you all the time you just haven’t discovered it yet.

All you need to do is turn off JavaScript in your browser. JavaScript is a programming language that was initially developed to include features like validate online forms or create dynamic animations of content.

Javascripts are technically small programs and need computational power. However, with the exponential increase in hardware performance, JavaScript has been used for all kinds of things.

When you visit a site that contains JavaScript, the programs are automatically started. Many of these scripts are loaded from third party sites, which then can load other scripts, such that it quickly becomes difficult to keep track of what they do. Over 94% of all websites use JavaScript. Google is probably the biggest supplier of third party JavaScripts, which helps build many websites.

JavaScripts are especially important when it comes to advertising. The great advantage for advertisers is that they no longer have to impose what you are going to see. By running conditionals on your information, they can tailor the ads to your interests.

If you are concerned about your privacy and want to have full control of what happens to your information on your device, turning off JavaScript in your browser is mandatory. Without JavaScript you will run into many sites that don’t work. Many sites load content like images or videos from content delivery networks, which only work with JavaScript turned on. Same for videos on Youtube or slideshows on Facebook.

Luckily, most sites do work without JavaScript and there are even sites that have optimized their pages to display properly without JavaScript. Here, we even have to give credit to Facebook and Twitter, which work with JavaScript turned off.

On the other hand, there are many benefits in turning off JavaScript. The load time is drastically reduced since we no longer wait for external content to load. At the same time, loading less saves unnecessary data consumption. There is also much less advertisement and no annoying pop-ups that asks for your email address for their newsletters. Many news sites restrict the number of articles non-premium members can read by using JavaScript. If you turned it off, you have no restrictions at all!

Completely turning of JavaScript is very inconvenient for everyday use. Luckily, there is an add-on for your browser called NoScript that controls what site can use JavaScript. With NoScript, you can choose which resources can be loaded by what site. Sites can be white-listed and scripts can be allowed temporarily or permanently. The add-ons looks like below.

Example view of the NoScript extension on nytimes.com. Content can be allowed or blocked for individual sources; either temporarily of permanently.

SnowHaze also includes a handy control of JavaScript. On top of the setting to turn on and off JavaScript globally, you can also choose per site if you want to allow JavaScript. SnowHaze doesn’t offer the selectivity of choosing which resources to allow but this is not a problem since tracking scripts (JavaScript with the sole purpose of tracking you) are blocked either way by default.

Screenshot of SnowHaze with the JavaScript page setting turned of for New York Times. All page settings can be changed permanently or temporarily.

Now it’s up to you to try surfing the internet for at least one week without JavaScript. The best way is to install NoScript in your Firefox and use our free browser SnowHaze on your mobile devices. Tell us about your JavaScript free experience!

SnowHaze will soon support anonymous payment methods

Jan — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 14:42:25 +0000

The big crypto currency hype is over – luckily. Once the gamblers and con-men are out of the crypto currency game, we can finally start using them for what they were originally designed for – decentralized and potentially anonymous payments.

Let’s start with the big news first: In a few weeks our SnowHaze VPN service will be extended to all platforms! We are excited to be able to serve all customers across different platforms and we want to use this chance to extend our supported payment methods. As the first VPN company to provide a VPN with privacy by design; we will start to offer truly anonymous payment methods, too.

Our VPN service has been thus far iOS only targeted and Apple handled all the subscriptions and payments. While payments in the App Store are not generally anonymous, with respect to SnowHaze VPN they are, as we do not receive any information about our customers. We see user data as a liability and thus want to avoid the collection of user data at all cost. The less we know about you, the better it is for you, as we cannot disclose what we don’t know and there is zero risk of any information leaks.

Starting with the extension of our VPN service to all platforms, you will be able to sign up for our VPN service without disclosing an e-mail address or any other personal information. In addition, you will be able to pay with cash and crypto currencies. You might be wondering how we handle your account, if we don’t even have an e-mail address. More details will follow soon: follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep updated. Our unique account management is essentially based on cryptography and designed to provide the best privacy possible. And what is more private than paying with cash without even disclosing an e-mail address? Moreover, our VPN will continue to offer privacy by design and not just privacy by policy. We will share about the exact specifications in the next weeks, so stay tuned!

The crypto currencies we will support include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and Monero. Drop us an e-mail if there are other currencies that you would like to see supported.

Very soon we will also be starting a forum and a newsletter to keep in touch with our users. If you have any questions in the meantime, write us an e-mail or contact us through Wire. We love to get customer feedback and want to create a better world wide web, together with you!

What’s new in SnowHaze 2.5

Jan — Sun, 06 May 2018 21:45:48 +0000

We are thrilled to have just released SnowHaze version 2.5. This version of SnowHaze comes with many new and exciting features! In this article, we are covering in detail some of the new and improved features in SnowHaze 2.5. The release notes of version 2.5 can be found here.

Open Source

TL/DR: SnowHaze is now fully open source!

We are very proud to announce that SnowHaze is now fully open source. As a company pushing privacy and security, it has always been a goal for us to provide the source code for SnowHaze. Many people rely on SnowHaze every day. To be sure, that everything you do with SnowHaze is private and safe we make all of SnowHaze’s source code publicly available.

Why have we not been open source in the past you ask? We want to do what we preach and we would like to address this legitimate question honestly.

When we released SnowHaze 1.0 on July 27th in 2016, there was neither SnowHaze VPN nor a subscription plan. To push the development up to the version released today, we chose a transparent and fair revenue model. The app was not available for free and the revenue covered the development cost of the versions that followed. Thus, making the source code publicly available posed a risk for us. Somebody could have just copied the code and made an identical app available free of charge. To secure the revenue for the further development, we decided not to publish the source code until the revenue was more robust. This business decision ultimately secured the further development of SnowHaze and led us to where we are today. Since SnowHaze can be downloaded for free, making the source code available is not a risk any longer. We can proudly say that we have a steadily growing revenue that allows us to publish the source code today.

You can find the SnowHaze source code here.

It is an honor for us to have your support and we are satisfied to have made it to this point with your help. Now, with making SnowHaze open source, we take a big step towards our ultimate goal of a community-driven SnowHaze, where the privacy and security of SnowHaze help people to regain freedom in the digital world.

SnowHaze VPN IPSec

TL/DR: SnowHaze additionally offers IPSec VPN connections from within the SnowHaze app!

Let’s back up a little to get a quick overview of SnowHaze VPN. Before version 2.5, SnowHaze VPN used the OpenVPN protocol for all VPN connections, which is only possible with the third-party app “OpenVPN Connect”. As the first and only VPN provider SnowHaze VPN uses identical login credentials for all VPN users. We cannot distinguish between VPN users, as our competitors can.

Just on a side note, protocols like OpenVPN define the way of communication between the client (your iOS device) and the VPN server.

New Apple guidelines no longer allowed us to solely rely on a third-party application to establish the VPN connection. We took this chance, went back to the desk, and redesigned the VPN section from scratch. Now, SnowHaze VPN is much more comfortable and you can do everything from within SnowHaze. However, for legal reasons, only the protocol IPSec could be used for connections from within SnowHaze.

As of version 2.5 SnowHaze VPN now supports both OpenVPN and IPSec. While you can establish IPSec connections directly from within SnowHaze, OpenVPN connections work just like before version 2.5 with the app “OpenVPN Connect”.

What do these changes mean?

We initially chose the setup with the OpenVPN protocol and the “OpenVPN Connect” app, as it allowed us to offer the best security and privacy possible. We are still the only VPN provider that uses identical login-credentials for every user.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to setup IPSec in a way that allows us to have all our users share the same login credentials. But under no circumstances did we want to do what our competitors do – have unique login credentials for every user. To still guarantee a private authorization process we created a new process.

Every day, every IPSec user gets 100 unique login credentials with the valid token. Because all users share the same token, we do not know who gets which set of login credentials. From these login credentials the user randomly chooses a different set for each session. Although unique login credentials are used, we cannot link different sessions or identify individual users!

Below you can find a table that summarizes the advantages and drawbacks of the different protocols and setups.

OpenVPN

IPSec

Advantages

More secure protocol

Single login credentials

Better usability; everything can be done within SnowHaze

Unique login credentials changing with every session

Disadvantages

Third-party app is needed to establish the connection

Less secure protocol

If you have been using SnowHaze VPN before, nothing changes for you and you can still use it the way you are used to! Additionally, you can switch to IPSec connection and thus benefit from better usability. Both options are included in any subscription and you may always switch between the two.

Should I choose IPSec or OpenVPN?

This is an important point to consider when using SnowHaze VPN or any other VPN for that matter. It is easier for you to set up an IPSec connection with SnowHaze VPN because you do it from within SnowHaze. OpenVPN – on the other hand – requires the app “OpenVPN Connect”. Once a month, you have to export the new OpenVPN profiles from SnowHaze to “OpenVPN Connect”. As you can see, regarding usability IPSec is the leader against OpenVPN.

However, IPSec is known to be slightly more vulnerable than OpenVPN. Clearly, this does not mean that OpenVPN is unbreakable neither that IPSec is insecure, but from a security standpoint, we recommend to stick with OpenVPN.

To sum it all up: If the additional steps required to establish an OpenVPN connection make you not use a VPN at all, then go for the IPSec connection that is much easier to establish right from within the SnowHaze app. While the IPSec connection is not the most secure option, you are still way ahead of the majority of internet users regarding protection.

Strip tracking parameters from URLs

TL/DR: SnowHaze is the first iOS browser able to de-personalize URLs!

This newly introduced feature is the most exciting one concerning privacy. Often, links contain unnecessary parameters that are used solely for tracking.

Let’s consider an URL like ‘www.abcdefg.co/page_3/tracking_id:”123-123-123″‘. Now, let’s assume this URL was shared with you. If we omit the tracking ID in the URL, e.g. ‘www.abcdefg.ch/page_3/tracking_id:””‘ or ‘www.abcdefg.ch/page_3/’ and the URLs still lead to the exact same page as the original URL, then the parameter ‘tracking_id’ can be considered as unnecessary and only hurting your privacy.

As the only browser on iOS, SnowHaze now offers to strip such tracking parameters from URLs. Every time you visit a URL containing this kind of personalization, SnowHaze offers you to remove all parameters known to be unnecessary from the URL. Currently, the function is based on a blacklist, which is regularly updated. Although we do our best to keep the blacklist clean and up to date, we decided to prompt the user every time SnowHaze finds parameters that can be left out. This way we can provide a smooth browsing experience and reduce the number of broken pages to a minimum.

Please note that this setting is turned off by default, as some people might find the prompts annoying. So, do not forget to turn it on!

Protection from dangerous links

TL/DR: SnowHaze now offers XSS protection!

Another noteworthy new function is the XSS (cross-site-scripting) protection. According to several studies, cross-site-scripting remains one of the biggest threats on the internet. Several different cross-site-scripting attacks are possible. The main concept is that HTML properties are abused to make the user run scripts on the device, which may be malicious.

We have added a new functionality to SnowHaze to prevent XSS. SnowHaze looks for specific patterns in HTML code and the URL to find potential XSS. Whenever SnowHaze detects possible XSS, the user is asked whether or not the particular script should be blocked.

Additional newsworthy functions

Indication of unsecured sites

It is easier than ever before to encrypt a website. In fact, there’s no reason not to use HTTPS. Unfortunately, there’s still a large number of (major!) websites not using HTTPS. Visit this site to see which sites. We want to make people more aware of unencrypted websites and the associated risk. Therefore, we chose to mark unencrypted websites with a yellow “danger sign” in the URL bar, as you can see in the image below.

Free trials

It’s not new as of 2.5, but we’d still like to mention it. If you are a new subscriber, you get the first week of the subscription for free.

Summary

With version 2.5 a lot of things have changed and we added new exciting features.

First of all, SnowHaze is now fully open source.

SnowHaze VPN offers now both OpenVPN and IPSec connections. While OpenVPN can be used just like before, IPSec connections can now be established easily within the SnowHaze app. IPSec connections are possible without any third party application with only a few clicks. It really is much more convenient

We are thrilled to have you on board with us. Please reach out to us if there is something you do not like and tell your family and friends if there is something you do like! We read and reply to every message and really appreciate your feedback.

SnowHaze 2.0

Jan — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 15:58:22 +0000

After a year of further development, we are very pleased to announce SnowHaze 2.0. SnowHaze comes with a lot of cool new features. All of them help to further elevate the level of privacy and security and make SnowHaze still the only iOS browser that truly protects user data. The new features elevate SnowHaze to an unrivaled level on iOS.

The biggest change is the price of SnowHaze: Starting today, SnowHaze Private Browser is now available as a free application. So now that the financial argument is not valid anymore, go get friends and family, colleagues and strangers, and convince them to change their default browser. Now they literally have no more reasons to turn you down on this. Get everybody you know on the privacy train! The more we are, the better.

SnowHaze VPN

The biggest new feature is clearly the introduction of SnowHaze VPN. SnowHaze VPN is a full no-log VPN service. This means none of your metadata or traffic is monitored or stored by us. Your data just gets rerouted through our servers but everything stays private and secure and we don’t know and don’t want to know what you are doing. Because we don’t collect any information, nothing can be shared, leaked or revealed.

A trusted VPN service is a very important part of personal privacy and security and has been the biggest lack of SnowHaze so far. A VPN or Virtual Private Network is a way to extremely increase the personal privacy and security.

The basic idea of a VPN is that the whole traffic is rerouted through a VPN server. The VPN server then reroutes this traffic to its final destination. SnowHaze only uses self-hosted and dedicated VPN servers. The whole traffic between the VPN server and the user device is encrypted. The encryption protects the content from any sniffer.

The big gain in privacy stems from the fact that the recipient can only see the IP address of the VPN server but not the user’s true IP address. Although an IP address does not uniquely identify a user, it does reveal a lot of information. Therefore, hiding the IP address is important for staying private.

The big gain in security comes from the fact that all traffic from the user to the VPN server is encrypted with state of the art encryption. Often, data transmitted over public WLANs is unencrypted. Unencrypted connections are especially prone to man in the middle attacks. In these cases unencrypted connections are interfered and sensitive data, like bank data or login details can be stolen. Always using a VPN can circumvent this. When using a VPN the connection from your device to the server is always encrypted so nothing can be intercepted, and you stay completely private and secure. This is also important when considering the possible sniffing of your ISP. Your ISP can see all of your connections and all of its associated metadata. In case of an unencrypted connection, such as sending and receiving e-mails, the ISP can even read the content. By rerouting your connection through a VPN server you prevent your ISP from seeing your traffic and you can reduce the metadata generated to a minimum. The only connection your ISP will ever see is the connection to the VPN server. Since the traffic is encrypted, the ISP cannot see the true IP address of the destination, but only the IP address of the VPN server.

Now, there are many VPN services out there, why do we need another one?

Well there are a few things that really set SnowHaze VPN apart from competitors. First and most importantly, we have a very short and clear privacy policy. It basically says in very few and simple sentences, easy for everybody to verify, that we do not store, log or monitor any information on our VPN service. It is clear that still a lot of trust is needed to gain customers for a VPN service, but we are convinced that having a very intuitive and short privacy policy helps build up that trust.

Furthermore we really push the boundary of what type of information is needed to build a connection. To our knowledge, SnowHaze VPN is the first and only VPN that only needs the IP address to create and sustain a connection. We were not able to circumvent this because the IP address is needed for sending and receiving data packages. The IP address is partly identifying information, which could not be used by SnowHaze servers to uniquely identify and track users. As soon as the connection is lost, the IP address is deleted. As already mentioned, absolutely nothing is logged.

For the authorization process for setting up the connection between the user device and the VPN server, every user gets the same login credentials. It is therefore impossible for us to distinguish between users based on the login credentials. Unfortunately many of our competitors do track their users based on device number, login credentials and user IDs. VPN companies can be extremely powerful trackers, because the entire internet connection of the user passes the VPN servers. We therefore strongly believe that only no log services can provide sufficient security. Since SnowHaze VPN cannot even distinguish its users, this provides more and unprecedented protection of the personal data.

All the billing is handled by apple. We do not know who bought subscriptions, we cannot distinguish our subscribers based on any login credentials, and we only know how many people have bought a subscription. This means people have the maximum possible amount of privacy towards us. Unfortunately, we still do not get around saving the IP address temporarily to create and sustain the connection. Once the connection is over the IP address is deleted from our VPN server.

Search engine

We are furthermore very proud to announce the SnowHaze search engine. It is a search engine, run and hosted by SnowHaze, based on the open source search engine Gigablast. The search engine does not track or monitor any of its users. Search engines are a vulnerable part to data leaks in your online behavior. The reason for this is the often large amount of data revealed when using a search engine. It is therefore best to use a search engine that has a good privacy policy (and reasonably good results, too). We chose StartPage as the default search engine in SnowHaze. StartPage does have a good privacy policy and thanks to search results provided by Google, the results are satisfying. However, there is a downside to this setup. While Google does not know your identity, when you are using StartPage, it will still see what you are searching. In certain cases this can still reveal a lot about you and even deanonymize you totally.

If your search query contains identifying information, it is a good idea to use a search engine that does not share your information with anybody. This is where SnowHaze search engine comes into play. While clearly not one of the best search engines with respect to the results – we certainly have one of the best privacy policies around – we do not log/share/monitor anything, period.

More and better tracking protection

The number of tracking and sites detected has highly increased. The number of private sites recognized has even increased tenfold. The protection against tracking scripts is highly important and an extensive list of tracking sites is essential for any private browser.

Phishing protection

SnowHaze introduces a new two layer phishing protection. The first level consists of warnings based on the extensive lists of Phishtank.org and Google Safebrowsing. Both lists are stored locally on your device and no connections are necessary to generate the advisories. Optionally, the lists can be updated regularly over SnowHaze servers. Still, no connections will be established to Google or Phishtank.org.

The second layer of the phishing protection is the possibility to mark sites as trusted. The user can use this to mark sites, where the user needs to log in or to provide other personal information. Whenever the user visits this site again, the user can easily check with a symbol in the URL bar, whether this site has been trusted. This way the user knows if the correct site has loaded.

SnowHaze Premium

In order to finance the further development of SnowHaze and to cover the cost of the VPN servers, a few SnowHaze features are only available to subscribed customers. These include the VPN service, the search engine and daily list updates of the ad, tracking, private and phishing sites lists.

How does SnowHaze protect your privacy?

Jan — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 14:06:55 +0000

As its name suggests this is the SnowHaze blog. Since I’m one of SnowHaze’s creators I’m not unbiased when writing an article about SnowHaze. However, I wouldn’t have helped to build SnowHaze if something alike had already existed before. So I have to stress that I’m also truly convinced that SnowHaze is — for the purpose it serves — the absolutely best of it’s kind. The following article isn’t an advertisement anyway but just an in-depth explanation of what SnowHaze does to protect your privacy.

Deleting Cookies, Cache and History

Deleting your cookies, caches and history is the part that any standard browser can do. If for example you activate incognito mode , then this is what Firefox will do to protect your privacy.

Deleting your cookies after each session or blocking them altogether is probably the absolute minimum you will have to do to protect your privacy. Cookies are extremely powerful for tracking people and are by far the easiest and most commonly used way to track internet users and devices.

Deleting your history is one of the first and easiest things you can do to protect your privacy. Since your history is only saved on your device you might think that it is not accessible over the Internet. As shown by researchers of Stanford University this is unfortunately not the case. It is possible for a website to see whether a specific website is in your history or not. This can be used by websites to track you . For these reasons I highly suggest you turn off your history.

When choosing the default settings, SnowHaze will save the history and delete the cookies and the cache after each session. Saving the history in SnowHaze is not a problem because SnowHaze handles the history differently than other browsers. The history is therefore not vulnerable to these kinds of attack. You can also turn off the history at any time.

Regarding cookies, we chose to accept them but delete them after each session. This makes the surfing experience much more comfortable because many websites just don’t work if you don’t accept cookies. So page access is often restricted when not accepting cookies at all. It is furthermore detectable if a browser blocks cookies. Blocking all cookies makes it therefore easier to track you. Since SnowHaze deletes the cookies after each session you won’t be putting your privacy at risk.

Tracking scripts, Javascript and Ads

Tracking scripts are pieces of JavaScript (a programming language) code that are used by websites (can even be third party websites) to track you. If the intention of these scripts is only to track you as a user and do not offer you any value we consider them to be tracking scripts. They are annoying, violate your privacy and make websites load slower, as they use more data. Therefore it’s usually advisable to block tracking scripts. SnowHaze offers a function called “block tracking scripts” that only blocks tracking scripts.

With SnowHaze you can not only block tracking scripts specifically but also block JavaScript altogether. This will of course further increase your privacy. For most users this is however not advisable as it can lead to issues when loading some websites.

Most people think of Ads as an annoyance, often forgetting that they also pose threat to your privacy. They often track website visitors in ways similar to tracking scripts, as well. SnowHaze offers an Ad blocker that blocks third party Ads.

HTTPS, Canvas, User-Agent – Protection against fingerprinting

SnowHaze also protects you from “browser fingerprinting”. The goal of fingerprinting is to uniquely identify a browser (and therefore a device). If it is possible to uniquely fingerprint a device it then is easy to track this device across all websites that know the fingerprint. There are several ways to fingerprint a browser. Some common ways are: HSTS supercookies, Canvas and User-Agent. Below I’ll explain what each of those techniques is and what SnowHaze does to protect you from being fingerprinted:

HSTS supercookie: A website that supports secure connections and intents to continue doing so can inform your browser of this using HSTS. While this is important and makes sense, the website can abuse this HSTS information the website gives your browser to uniquely fingerprint your device. In most browsers you can’t influence the HSTS data directly, so you can’t really do anything about it . Some browser will however delete HSTS data automatically when set to their “private mode”. SnowHaze will delete HSTS data after each session by default. Additionally SnowHaze has an extensive list of websites that are known to support HTTPS. To all of these websites SnowHaze can already connect over HTTPS (which means encrypted) and therefore doesn’t need HSTS on these known sites. SnowHaze also offers to always try to connect encrypted to a website before establishing an unencrypted connection. Using HTTPS wherever possible is recommended for privacy protection.
Canvas: The HTML 5 canvas element can also be used to fingerprint your browser. For more information please click here. With SnowHaze we offer you the possibility to spoof such fingerprints. Not many other browsers offer this.
User-Agent: The user agent (For more information about user agents, please refer here) is widely used for fingerprinting browsers. SnowHaze will automatically spoof user agents. This means that SnowHaze will automatically tell the website wrong user agents. Additionally our user agents don’t really contain much information, making it therefore very hard to distinguish between different users and pointless to even keep track of this user agent. With each session SnowHaze switches between the chosen user agents.

As you have read, SnowHaze offers you a lot of features to truly protect your personal data. Most of the features that SnowHaze offers have somehow been available before. What makes SnowHaze special however, is that it combines all of these features in a single app. What makes SnowHaze even more special is that it is easy to use and well designed. It’s the combination of all of these features that makes SnowHaze the best choice. Frankly, a browser that doesn’t offer the combination that SnowHaze does isn’t really a browser worth using.