Privacy is a full time job

The more I spend time tinkering with privacy related software, addons and configuration the more I ask myself what's the point. Depending on your threat model, level of paranoia, free time and/or patience, some people go all out with privacy while others are happy with an acceptable baseline.

For me personally, I do the bare minimum in preventing myself from being tracked, but I care more about minimizing malware, ads, the information I share with corporations and keeping my online presence segregated. I simply do not have the patience (or need) to make myself fingerprint resistant or untrackable.

With that being said, even getting half way there has been an exhausting and painful experience. We are we we are because of the state of the software industry. Data maximization at all costs, security and privacy as an afterthought, dark patterns, multi-million dollar advertising budgets infecting every corner of our lives and the web being too complicated. Browsers are insanely complicated pieces of software (and continue to get more complicated as we add more useless features to web standards) that require constant tinkering and configuration. It's a cat and mouse game that will never end for consumers.

As I've lost my patience for configuration and like things to "just work" as much as possible, I don't really install unnecessary add-ons or use extensive userscripts in my browser. Yet, just to get to a level of where I'm happy, in Firefox I've had to install:

- ClearURLs

- Multi-account containers

- NoScript

- UBlock Origin

- Temporary Containers

There are other addons like DecentralEyes that have been recommended, but it is poorly maintained. ClearURLs suffers from a similar problem, at the time of writing, its ruleset has not been updated since last year which means there's a lot of URLs that won't be sanitized.

Furthermore, the plethora of undocumented about:config flags you have to set that can break websites, cause compatibility issues, addons that can cause compatibility issues with each other, then painstakingly debugging and making sure everything works... then something updates and breakage occurs and you have to go through the whole dance again. That's not even getting into advanced usage which requires even more investment of your time, from reading, configuring and changing of habits.

It shouldn't have to be this way. People go on the web to read articles, watch videos and communicate each other, not dedicate hours of their time tinkering with Rubegoldberg setups just to prevent themselves from being tracked by the surveillance machine. It doesn't help that Firefox is a sinking ship due to its user-hostile attitude its been demonstrating lately and there aren't really any good privacy-respecting alternatives.

Maybe I should just stop using the web?