The Paranoid Kit

In real life, I am a person who is best described as shy, and quiet. People that know me personally would probably think different... I'm loud, argumentative, and when i don't like something, I'm all talk with no walk.

However, one great thing about the Internet is that people are not encumbered by 'who they are'. The rich, spoiled, teenager has about the same 'power' as a middle aged blue collar worker that deserves more. Its not that people want to be someone else when they step online, but more like the playing field becomes equal. Newspapers compete with YouTuber's that want to produce news worth information. Goons can troll all day long to try and run some agenda while someone else works on a project for public benefit. It doesn't matter, people are powerful while purpose and information have no bounds. But the story in my eyes isn't that the Internet is so great because we are empowered with these tools, but that we can do these things almost completely anonymously... almost.

While some people willingly post their personal information in screen name or hop on to sites like MySpace & Facebook without a second thought, these same people have ability use another email address or alias as they choose... Its pretty easy. I think most people tend to think of the Internet as some portal -- they can walk around in it and have little to fear about what they choose go or what to look at. After all, your simply reading this aren't you... that's not harmful (yet) is it?!

But i think the reality is that this is simply not true. People are being watched, across one site on to the next. History gets stored and analyzed. Traffic is logged and patterns develop. Anonymity has been replaced as a 'unique visitor ID' and isn't really possible. Even the most earnest attempts to keep yourself anonymous don't always work: you can get identified or embarrassed publicly. People deserve better than to have some corporation leak out your personal life (disgusting or not) and rain on your parade, and you there isn't some magic button that lets you 'opt-out' in most cases.

But i thought i would give it my best effort and created a collection of Mozilla add-ons on the AMO site. To say the least, you might not be able to be anonymous, but you can at least curve yourself away from some of the most common privacy concerns and stay under the radar most of the time.

Please check out my add-on collection: The Paranoid Kit.

Its goal is to block ads, as well as scripts that launch ads, targeted advertising, analytics... bugs, beacons... cookies & LSO... ...all the garbage, but try not to break your web. If you have any recommendations, please follow up and thanks for reading.