[tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle

[Brian Franklin]

Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle

Two reasons

1. Privacy. Fairly obvious why we do this. Stopping ads and ad tracking is consistent with the privacy mission of the Tor Project.

2. Network health. Congestion has always been a problem on Tor. Installing these plugins to stop HTTP requests which don't help the user reduces congestion on the network and speeds up page loads for each user and everybody else. Browsers won't be slowed down loading tons of ads and ad scripts and the network won't have to process many requests for junk. I think we can save a ton of bandwidth by stopping the junk requests.


While we are at it we should enable Firefox's do not track header. It won't help the network speed but it will marginally increase privacy for those who have it set. It will also protect the privacy of people who enable it manually if all Tor bundle installations are sending the same headers. It also increases the use of the header in the wild because the more browsers that send it the more advertisers and governments have to take notice of our desire for privacy. The Tor project can make a big contribution to making this header more widely used.

The Adblock should be configured to work and not need setup. Select a few good lists and have them automatically in. This will save users the time of doing it themselves and help people who don't know how.

Ghostery has to be configured to block tracking scripts and cookies before first use. The Tor project should have that done automatically.

If anybody doesn't want to use Adblock they can disable it with one click. I don't know why anybody who goes to the trouble of using Tor would want to be tracked by ads but to each his own. Disabling it takes 2 seconds if somebody want's to.