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.
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