When I read news and reports about modern spyware I am a little bit discouraged about  my privacy. But I also think that something can always be done to improve privacy levels.

This time I don’t want to talk about password strength but I will try to focus your attention on some Firefox add-ons can could positively impact on your privacy.

The first is about Random Agent Spoofer that is able to obfuscate your computer configuration (better: identity) when you connect to a remote server = Internet.

This add-on is really flexible and you will spend just a couple of minutes to decide what  configuration can be useful for you. In particular you can decide how often you desire to change your agent profile and if you prefer to use just desktop agents or to appear as if you were connected through a mobile device. 

Moreover, you can choose if you want to:

• Send spoofed ‘If-None_Match’ headers (ETags)

• Send spoofed ‘X-Forwarded-For’ headers                         

• Send spoofed ‘Via’ headers                                                                     

• Accept headers match the selected browser profile

• Spoof accepted documents

• Spoof accepted encoding

• Spoof accepted language (US English)

And if you have time you can also play with the many extras as:

• Use standard font set

• Disable local dom storage

• Limit tab history to 2

• Disable browsing and download history

• Disable browser cache

• Disable geolocation

• Disable link prefetching 

• Disable dns prefetching

• Disable webgl

If you prefer a less complex agent spoofer or you are planning to use it seldom, you can use User-Agent Switcher that contains fewer features and needs to be manually configured but it’s intuitive and equally effective.

The second add-on I suggest to install is TrackMeNot that will help to defend your privacy contrasting web search engines profilation with a (huge,-if you want-) number of false queries from your browser. The (huge) number of queries about general topics will obfuscate search engines’ profile about your personal preference. Also in this case this add-on allows you to decide what kind of false queries you want to submit and how often TrackMeNot will “search” the web.

The third recommended add-on is ZenMate, a free VPN service that has obtained positive reviews by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) also because ZenMate is “based in Berlin and operates under strict German data protection laws”. ZenMate is free, easy to use and let you choose between four different exit node also if using the free base version:

– Germany 

– Romania

– Hong Kong

– USA

Last but not least, keep attention on Flash Files. Do they are so essential for you? You have to keep in mind that sometimes, also if you use a VPN as Zen Zone, you can be betrayed by Flash files. In fact, videos based on Flash can potentially leak your identity also if you try to hide your IP behind a VPN or a proxy.