User Questions – SnowHaze

User Questions Answered

Yvan — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 11:24:34 +0000

We get a lot of questions from users and here we answer some of them that might be relevant for a broader audience. We really appreciate the interest in privacy of our users and are always open for suggestions and feedback.

I have a subscription on my iPhone, can I use the same subscription on the iPad or do I need to subscribe again?
You can use the subscription on all devices running on the same Apple ID. On the device where you have not yet the subscription, go to the SnowHaze Settings → Subscription and tap on „Restore Purchases“. This will check with your Apple ID if you already have an active subscription and activate it in the app.

You have a free trial of seven days, do I need to wait seven days to use all functions?
You can use all Premium functions within the seven days. We hope that by testing the app with all features you can better decide if it is the right service for you. Make sure to cancel if you don’t want the subscription. Of course, we look forward to have you on board.

A webpage is not loading properly, what is going wrong?
A common cause for broken websites or videos not loading are content blockers. In the settings under “Content Blocker”, you can choose different types of content to be blocked. Make sure that no content blocker is accidentally turned on. If the problem persists, drop us a line and we’ll help you fix it.

I’m on 12.0.1 but SnowHaze showing my user-agent as 11.4.1. It’s a bug or feature?
This is not a bug. It’s actually the user agent spoofing feature of SnowHaze. SnowHaze has common user agents predefined and every time you open a new tab, the user agent is randomly selected from the list of user agents that you have selected in the settings (SnowHaze Settings → User Agent). For example, FxiOS means that SnowHaze pretends to be a Firefox browser. You can also open a tab that has a Desktop user agent by going to the tab switching view and tapping on the three dots. The user agent is faked and change to avoid that sites can track you based on this information. With every new version the user agents are updated to the latest and most common ones. This blends you right into the mass and makes it harder to track you.

Can I set a Desktop user agent?
In SnowHaze you can open tabs with a desktop user agent. For this, go to the tab view and tap the three white dots. In the menu you can turn on the option “Desktop User Agent” and create a new tab as shown in the image below. The user agent is set per tab and is active until you close that tab.
It might be that a webpage still doesn’t show the desktop version of their page. This can be if they decide based on your screen size. Look around on the page if there is a button to show the desktop version of the page.

Why not have options for SnowHaze users to choose their own anti-tracking/anti-ad lists?
This would indeed be a very powerful feature. We will look at it when our current big development projects are done and we have a less busy schedule. We really appreciate ideas for new feature.

I love SnowHaze on iOS and I’d like to use it in my company, but the “forget/suggest private sites” feature makes it improper for business use.
SnowHaze tries to cover all aspects of data protection. Private sites are one part of it and therefore we offer the option to have them automatically removed. By default private sites are not suggested when making a search, which I think is appropriate for business use. If we didn’t include this option, they would be always suggested, which is far less suitable. We think that it is the most elegant way to disable these entries.

How can I change the language in SnowHaze to be Swiss German?
In the Apple settings under General → Language & Region, add “Swiss German (Schwiizertüütsch)” to your languages. Then drag Swiss German to the top of your preferred language order. Whenever content is available in Swiss German it will prioritize it over whatever your default language is.

We would like to thank all the privacy-devoted users and encourage everybody to help us find flaws and improve SnowHaze. Do not hesitate to contact us for questions, feedback or bug reports. You can contact us through our webform, by email or use our Wire support. Download Wire on all your devices and connect with us @snowhaze!

User Questions Answered

Yvan — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 15:13:44 +0000

It is too long to wait six months for a new version to have an update for the lists and I already have a VPN provider. Can you do an option to only buy the list updates? Also do you limit bandwidth for non-premium users?
We give updates more frequently than every six months. This year we had some technical difficulties to deal with, so we had an exceptional longer time span between updates. From what we hear from our customer base there is too less of a need for the list updates only. We don’t limit bandwidth neither for premium nor for non-premium users.

Can I open a link in a new tab?
Apple doesn‘t allow to change the menu that pops up and to add this feature. Technically it is easy to do and several other browsers have done it, but this is against Apple‘s policies. With 3D Touch devices, you can Force Tap and drag upwards to open links in a new tab.

I noticed that the user agent switches randomly but not for every site. How does the choice of user agent work?
The user agent is set for every new tab and is chosen randomly from the user agents selected in the settings. The user agent is then set for that tab until the tab is closed. An open tab keeps the same user agent for its entire open time.

When having all fingerprinting protections turned on, some sites do not work in SnowHaze but do so in other browsers with all protections turned on. Why?
The fingerprinting protection in SnowHaze and in other browsers is a collection of many different technologies to protect from fingerprinting. Currently, SnowHaze has compiled the most fingerprinting protections in its free private browser and this wide range is not available in other browsers. This lead to different website behavior when this option is active. Should your favorite site not load properly, send us an email and we can guide you to set it up properly.

The site list is huge. It is misleading on the actual size of the app. Can you add the lists to the App Store version of the app?
We chose to provide the app with a reduced list in the App Store and to load the site lists separately. The advantage is that the size for the App Store version is reduced under 100MB. Apple blocks downloading apps larger than 100MB when using mobile data. Many users wouldn’t be able to download SnowHaze while on the road. The list update happens only when connected to WiFi as default.

I read that some data is not always permanently erased or gets uploaded to iCloud. How does SnowHaze store/delete data?
Temporary data is never stored on the disk but remains in the RAM and is discarded upon ending a session or restarting the app. Other data is saved in a database. This data exists only locally and is not uploaded anywhere. No data from SnowHaze is stored in your iCloud or our severs.

When a warning pops up there is the choice to tap “Cancel” or “Continue”. If tapping “Cancel”, why does the site still load?
When tapping “Cancel”, loading of the blocked content is stopped, but the rest of the page is loaded. When chosing “Continue”, you accept to load the entire site. It’s up to you to decide if you want to load the content or not.

The warnings are annoying, please find a different way to handle these.
We noticed that sometime there are just too many warnings. We improved the handling of the warnings for our next update. Also, since SnowHaze is here to make online privacy easier and more accessible, we will turn off some notifications by default. You can manually turn on/off the warnings like you want them to be such that they won’t be affected with an update. If you never touched the warnings settings, the new defaults will be applied.

We would like to thank all the privacy-devoted users and encourage everybody to help us find flaws and improve SnowHaze. Do not hesitate to contact us for questions, feedback or bug reports. You can contact us through our webform, by email or use our Wire support. Download Wire on all your devices and connect with us @snowhaze!

User Questions Answered

Yvan — Sun, 23 Jul 2017 14:44:38 +0000

We really appreciate the interest in privacy of our users and are always open for suggestions and feedback. Some questions have come up lately that I would like to address in this post.

Why does SnowHaze not emit a “Do Not Track” request?
We chose not to include a “Do Not Track” notice as it sends additional information about the browser. It is important to minimize the amount of information that the browser sends to a site to best avoid browser fingerprinting. Besides, it is up to the site to respect this request and sites wanting to track their visitors will simply ignore it. It should rather be that the sites don’t have the possibility to track in the first place, instead of asking them not to. We think that the harm towards the privacy is bigger than the benefits of a “Do Not Track” request.

How can I open a link in a new SnowHaze tab?
It is possible to open a link in a new tab with devices supporting 3D Touch. For the other devices, it would be possible to display the “Open in New Tab” option, but the link would open in a new Safari tab, which is usually not wanted. From a technical point of view we could easily include this feature for all devices like Firefox does, but this violates Apple’s policies.

Is it possible to apply the site settings only temporarily?
With the SnowHaze version 2.0 coming in September, the page settings can be applied permanently or only temporarily. As some users may know from NoScript, this feature is very convenient for one-time visits of a site.

Will Apple’s new “Anti Adblocker” App Store policy affect SnowHaze?
As Apple says, applications that are interfering with the performance of other apps have never been tolerated on the App Store. The Ad blocker in SnowHaze blocks ads on the internet and cannot act within other applications of your device. SnowHaze will therefore not be affected and will continue to have an ad blocker to block internet ads.

Why does SnowHaze have a Canvas Fingerprint when testing on amiunique.org, panopticlick.eff.org and browserleaks.com?
There are two ways to protect oneself from Fingerprinting. The first is to ensure that the fingerprint is not unique and the second is to have a fingerprint that change in an unpredictable way. For Canvas Fingerprinting SnowHaze uses a changing fingerprint. SnowHaze uses both methods depending on what is more appropriate for the given fingerprinting method. Some sites are also only able to recognize the first method mentioned above.

We would like to thank all the privacy-devoted users and encourage everybody to help us find flaws and improve SnowHaze. Do not hesitate to contact us for questions, feedback or bug reports.