Gracjan's Blog

Block unwanted content in Safari with Filtre

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:02:20 +0200

I like to take control of what I see online. I use Wipr 2 to block ads, cookie popups and other things junking-up the web experience. I use Tapestry to follow my favorite information sources, largely because it has a great system for creating rules to muffle or mute content.

There was a gap in that strategy. I had no universal way of blocking topics across websites. That changed this month, when I discovered a newly-launched app.

Filtre is a new Safari extension made by a developer famous for the dark mode generating extension called Noir.

This new app allows you to create filter sets containing keywords that you specify. Any article, post or comment that matches these keywords will be blocked, regardless of which website it’s on. It works for YouTube, social media sites, blogs, news sources, etc. It should work on any site and if it doesn’t, you can easily report the issue to the developer.

You can choose how you want the app to handle the content that matches your keywords. It has four options: Hide, Fade, Grayscale and Blur.

You can choose default settings for all websites and customize them per site. This includes the style I mentioned in the previous paragraph, which filter sets are active and whether the extension is active at all.

For example, you can create a politics filtered that is applied across all sites, a clickbait filter only for YouTube or a movie spoiler filter for Mastodon, Bluesky and Reddit.

This app is changing my online experience for the better and I highly recommend you give it a try. You can try it for free and it’s affordable after that.

Privacy is not the same for everybody

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:31:00 +0000

Sometimes I see attitudes in the privacy community like there’s no valid reason to use any messenger other than Signal or everyone should use GrapheneOS on their phone and Linux on their PC, or no one should use Brave, just use Firefox, or don’t use Firefox because Mozilla is doing things I don’t like, just use Vivaldi.

This is not helpful. The sort of elitist, small-minded attitude of everyone should use the same tools and techniques I do, otherwise they’re stupid or a lost cause is deeply harmful to the goal of increasing people’s privacy and security, improving their digital rights and their relationship with technology.

Everyone is different. We all have different goals, different threat models, different lifestyles. We have different preferences for the things we like to use, and we have different things that we worry about. We also have varying levels of skills, knowledge, time, energy, and how comfortable we are with technology.

This is all totally okay. Not everyone needs to go hardcore. Not everyone needs to fully abandon cloud services or big tech products. Not everyone needs to self-host NextCloud. Not everyone needs to use GrapheneOS. Not everyone needs to use a Yubikey for 2FA or a local KeePass database for their passwords.

Using an iPhone is a better choice for many people than a phone with stock Android in terms of privacy. GrapheneOS is even better in many ways for that goal, but also has a steeper learning curve and worse software compatibility. Self-hosting is great, but it requires you to know what you’re doing, buy additional hardware (or rent a VPS), and be willing to manage everything (install updates, change security settings for your server, make your own backups, etc.).

Some people will use Tor Browser for most of their browsing. Others will use Firefox with uBlock Origin, Brave Browser, Vivaldi, or Safari with Wipr 2 or AdGuard. Some people will use Mullvad VPN, iVPN, or Proton VPN. Many people will be okay with iCloud Private Relay or decide that simply using encrypted DNS is enough for them.

These are all valid choices. We shouldn’t shame people because of them. We should match the tools and techniques with a specific person and their life instead of trying to forcefully shove said person into a perfect privacy box that we made for them.

People should use a password manager. That’s just a fact. It is recommended by countless security experts. That said, I can envision a situation where writing passwords on a piece of paper would be justifiable. I wouldn’t do it, and I recommend you don’t, but if an elderly person is not comfortable with using a password manager, or a homeless person doesn’t have their own device and can only use public computers, using a notebook to write down unique passwords may be a better solution than using the same, weak password for every account.

Ideally, everyone would delete their Facebook account. I wish that was the case, but many people can’t or are not willing to do so. Does that mean that we should just throw up our hands because we can’t do anything for them? I don’t think so. We can still encourage them to use a secure password, enable 2FA, add a passkey, change the visibility of their posts and various metadata about their account, use Facebook in the browser instead of the mobile app, and block Facebook trackers on other websites. All these measures aren’t as good as getting rid of Facebook entirely, but there are still a step forward.

We should all remember that privacy is a journey. Try to make small, incremental improvements to your setup and not stress too much about where it is lacking. Perfect privacy or perfect security doesn’t exist, but we can still try to achieve as much as is reasonable for us.

It’s also okay to scale back a bit when you realize that some choice that you made is becoming too burdensome. For example, I used to use too restrictive blocklists in my browser-level and DNS-level adblocker. I frequently had to add exceptions because the sites I wanted to access didn’t work. Now I try to use filters that still block a significant chunk of ads, trackers, and other junk, but also prioritize not breaking sites for the sake of achieving hardcore privacy.

Why privacy matters

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 22:45:00 +0000

Edward Snowden:

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Privacy is a fundamental human right. It is the foundation of a healthy society.

Human rights don’t exist without privacy. Freedom of the press depends on the protection of the communication of journalists and their sources, who may need to maintain anonymity to avoid retaliation. That cannot be achieved without tools like Tor. Without a free press, it’s hard to pressure the government to do what is good for the people, because we can’t expose wrongdoings and publicly criticize their actions.

Without proper technical safeguards (like end-to-end encryption and minimizing data collection), everyone is at risk of their data getting leaked or stolen by cybercriminals.

Without secure communication channels, people in vulnerable situations (like victims of domestic violence) will not feel comfortable reaching out for help, which will cause the abuse to continue.

Mass surveillance is inherently linked to government overreach. The initial goal is to combat threats like terrorism, organized crime, or child abuse. What ends up happening is that the measures introduced are ineffective at the task they were meant for while allowing censorship, false accusations of crimes, spying on political activists, and other risks to the general public.

When we require backdoors to various systems that are meant to be used by authorities of one country, there’s a high chance they’ll eventually be exploited by another, hostile country or regular cybercriminals. There is not such a thing as a backdoor only for the good guys.

Everyone has sensitive use cases. People use technology to communicate with their doctor, lawyer, or accountant. It’s unreasonable to portray security tools like Signal or Proton as something dangerous and used only by nefarious actors.

Companies having a large amount of data on their users can utilize that data to target ads, design addictive algorithms, and manipulate the user. It can cause you to have a skewed view of the world, develop mental health issues, or buy things you don’t need. The data can be used for purposes such as automatically raising the prices for specific users or unjustly denying access to services.

Privacy is not dead

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:37:00 +0000

We live in the age of surveillance capitalism, in which our data is harvested at a massive scale by corporations and sold to the highest bidder. Every day we see new data breaches, and governments regularly come up with bad ideas — like trying to force companies to introduce backdoors into their products, which are meant to give the government easy access to user data, but can (and will) be discovered and weaponized by cybercriminals.

We would be forgiven to think that privacy is a thing of the past, where we didn’t have cameras installed all around cities nor microphones in our pockets, where talking to someone meant meeting them in person, and the only ads were on TV or in newspapers, which inherently could not be targeted to a specific person.

I understand where this attitude comes from, and that it’s the way many people view the world, but I don’t think it accurately reflects reality.

Privacy will be dead if we let it happen. In many ways, we’ve seen privacy deteriorate over the course of this century, but it doesn’t have to be the end of it. We must remember that if enough people deem a cause to be doomed or a situation hopeless, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Together, by exercising personal digital hygiene, and fighting for our right to privacy when necessary in dealing with companies and governments, we can ensure the situation gets better or, at least, doesn’t deteriorate further.

In certain ways, there have been a lot of improvements on the privacy front. We’ve seen legislation passed that’s aimed at protecting digital rights (like GDPR and CCPA). The use of end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms has become widespread. Operating systems have introduced many features aimed at securing our data. The vast majority of Internet traffic is encrypted using HTTPS, which hasn’t been the case a decade ago, when Let’s Encrypt was introduced.

There are many ways each of us can improve our privacy and security online. It’s important to take small yet steady steps, improving our standing as we go. Privacy is a journey and a lifestyle. You don’t have to change everything in one day.

Perfect privacy doesn’t exist, but it’s all about making improvements. It’s like health. You won’t build muscle, lose a lot of weight, or improve your strength/flexibility by going to the gym or eating healthy for a few days. It’s about maintaining good habits in the long term.

Today, you start using a password manager, and over a week or two, you steadily change your passwords to secure ones. In a month, you may start thinking about finding a more private alternative to Google Chrome and installing a browser extension to block ads and trackers. In two months, you move to a secure messaging app. After a year or two, you might start to feel comfortable with using a (trustworthy — which not all are) VPN.

It’s important to remember that while online actors (like Google, Meta, or even cybercriminals) might have your past data, they don’t have your future data. Many kinds of data lose their relevance over time. Don’t let the mistakes of the past prevent you from making better decisions tomorrow. If you smoke, it’s not helpful to say that you’ve already done damage to your body, so quitting doesn’t matter. It does. Preventing further damage and potentially reversing at least a part of past damage matters a lot.