Announcing Freedombox-Privoxy

Posted 2012-01-17

Enhanced Privacy and Security for Web Browsing

One thing many people agree the FreedomBox should do is web filtering for privacy and ad-removal. Toward that end, the FreedomBox will act as a web proxy to clean up and protect web traffic.

We have a first draft version of privoxy up on git. It upgrades your web traffic to prefer ssl encryption whereever it can. It also strips tracking software from web pages to give you greater privacy and anonymity as you surf.

If you are a privoxy user, please do give this package a test run and report any problems on the issue tracker. We are working on upstreaming these changes to the privoxy project, and in the mean time, you can make a debian package quite easily from the git repository.

Further work will include writing a script to test all the https-everywhere rules and discard the ones that are broken. As well as one to periodically check for new regexes. Anybody who wants to contribute to writing that is welcome to jump on in!

More details about this part of FreedomBox can be found on our code page.