Some people just want to pick a different point on the tradeoff between convenience and privacy.
Imagine User A uses Fastmail every day, logging in manually every morning. User B uses Fastmail every day, with a saved login cookie. How is User B's privacy any worse? What would User B gain from not having that choice?
It's not a matter of user choice, it's a matter of maintenance and product integrity.
User B's privacy is objectively lessened by allowing tracking cookies, but that is their choice. What is out of the user's control is what mullvad chooses to spend their time supporting.
If mullvad allows users to turn off a privacy feature, now that's a permutation they have to test for. It's also an attack vector they've enabled, either through user carelessness or social engineering. Mullvad wants to be able to say "here's a browser, it's 100% private" and not have to say "as long as you do X, and don't do Y, and...". Every other browser already does that.
A possible scenadio might be that one day the user wants to log in to their other fastmail account, which they don't want to be linked to their main one in any way.
The GP said "some people" not everyone. Some people want all the convenience and the illusion of privacy; the benefits minus the cost. It's human nature to want something without paying for it, just as it is human nature to pretend that desire doesn't exist
What I'd like is a Mullvad container in regular Firefox so I can choose what sites to open in it, or rather make it the default and move a site to another container if I want permanent cookies. I use temporary containers now but the extra fingerprinting features appeal to me.
Your browser can still be fingerprinted without cookies. The site just needs enough unique information (user agent, timezone, screen size, IP, operating system, country, etc.) to form a trackable identity.
This is a surprisingly effective one when combined with other users of your network. A couple of years ago, I started getting Facebook ads for things I'd never looked at, but that I knew my wife had looked at. We don't share any devices, and she doesn't even have a Facebook account.
It's pretty troubling how invasive shadow profiles are.
There are 200 countries on this earth, and not all of them have the luxury of an uncorrupt, actually-democratic set of genuine public servants who wish only to create utmost benefit for the largest number of people.
If you have that, you're a minority. And if you believe you have that, but actually you don't, you'll find out only after it's too late to save it. It's prudent instead to assume and act like you don't have it in either case.
Indeed, some of the greatest democracies have been set up precisely to that end.
For many, online privacy isn't at all about advertising. It's about working to a common good of rights and freedom for all.
Rest on your laurels all you like, but don't deride others who refuse to. It is only through the efforts of such people, and in the past those like them, that any of us have the ability to take any such rest at all.
> Most of us are self-aware that I'm not that important to be specifically targeted.
Of course, not in the sense that the FBI, Wagner Group, or the boogy man are going after you today (but you never know what the future holds) - however data brokers and large companies have a financial incentive right now to know as much about everyone as possible and the information they collect is increasingly being used to decide your insurance rates, give you employment, etc.
>People who live a privileged life and have nothing else important going on in their life choose this hill to die on.
I mostly agree, however privacy issues impact the less privileged more, for example women seeking abortions in unfriendly states, teenagers learning about queer issues in a toxic community/family, people fleeing abusive relationships (the effort some stalkers do is truly insanity), minority groups (e.g. undocumented immigrants). Sure these groups can't dedicate lots of mental energy to privacy but plug and play browsers like this one make it easier and even if you are highly privileged protecting your privacy makes it more acceptable for others to do so too.
You're clearly not thinking enough about this. It's not just about ads. For just one example, think about the data acquired regarding fertility and abortion, and how it can be used with respect to some law alterations.
There are many other examples for present and potential futures, so no this isn't just about ads.
Well, I’d say this is largely privacy theater for hobbyists. Like a lot of other hobbies, unreasonable suffering is often part of the fun and creates a sense of belonging. What sets you apart if you’re just browsing like every other mortal?
Edit: As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are still plenty of identifying bits.
This is inherited from the upstream TOR browser. It's basically designed to evade fingerprinting by making the browser's fingerprint similar across all TOR browser's users. It's indeed very inconvenient so don't use these browsers unless you're seriously care about these stuff.
I thought it'd be possible by simply turning off "Always use private browsing mode" setting, but it doesn't seem to work. Sessions are still cleared upon browser exit.
In my case, I had to turn off that setting because without it, 1Password wouldn't work.
No one wants that, most websites become broken by taking pro-privacy measures. It's about not consenting to tracking. Right now the majority of users are implicitly giving consent to tracking.
It seems like a harmless thing to be tracked, but once the likes of haveibeenpwned.com came out and the databases that fuel it, and services that provide search utility to those databases, it should become clear that being tracked across every single website on the internet is probably not what you want.
Scenario: You apply for a job, they look up your totally-clean email address, see the email linked to an ip address on some database from a leaky website you applied for a job on, the ip address is linked to a service where you used a certain password which you used on 6 other services, one of which had a database leak of your system fonts, now you can see all the accounts to services to which your system fonts were identically matched. Oh look, you were 13 years old when you joined stack overflow on an abandoned account and you posted some humorous, incorrect solutions that were down-voted to oblivion. But that's ok, they invite you to the job interview and they make a funny remark about your stack overflow answers and then offer you a job. Do you want to work there now that you know they completely invaded your privacy ?
So in this scenario, if only you had used the Mullvad browser then... you wouldn't have have found out this employer snoops on their employees and might have accepted their job offer? You've concocted a scenario where a privacy-focused browser ends up causing you problems.
I'm not advocating for this browser specifically, only encouraging more people to take pro-privacy and online safety measures.
It's pointless to say the problem is the employer, or the hacker who released the data, or the programmer who relied on bad algorithms, or the admin who didn't secure the data. One way or another, this data will get leaked, the old hashing and encryption techniques will be broken and there will be people searching through it all. Forget about the government, at least they are beholden to law and maintaining the appearance of adhering to it. Substitute employer for neighbor, girlfriend or internet stalker and you have equally valid scenarios which are even more disturbing in my mind.
> > The timezone is spoofed, to combat fingerprinting.
The annoying thing about this (assuming it's the same as in Firefox) is that the times displayed in your own local History page are also "wrong" i.e. shown in UTC.
> Why is the time is wrong?
> The timezone is spoofed, to combat fingerprinting.
> What's this weird spacing around the websites?
> It’s called letterboxing, a function to combat fingerprinting (using your browser window size to identify you together with other measures).
> How do I stay logged into specific websites between sessions?
> It’s not possible. It’s an action to combat tracking.
Not sure if there are other measures, other than that the browser itself doesn't track anything.
Looking much better than a stock firefox, and presumably will improve over time.
[0] - https://mullvad.net/en/help/tag/mullvad-browser/