Ghostery takes care of most such things, including blocking the major spying tricks by the likes of Google and Facebook.
A decent ad blocker like AdBlock Plus will go some way to helping as well, though it's more of a side effect in that case.
There's also BetterPrivacy, which mostly deals with the non-cookie cookies like Flash LSOs.
Unfortunately, for reasons I can't fathom, even generally privacy-friendly browsers like Firefox still seem quite happy to send vast amounts of fingerprint-friendly information that serves almost no legitimate purpose to anyone who cares to listen. However, there are clearly people thinking about this, e.g., see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fingerprinting.
I have absolutely no facts whatsoever that they are misusing information. The only fact is that they have an obvious conflict of interest. I assume people interested in privacy would like to be aware of it. I'm sorry that you don't consider it relevant but I am certain others do.
I learned recently that Ghostery is owned by Evidon and thus no longer trust it.
For what it's worth, they have a clear statement in their legal docs about the data they send back (or the absence of such data, if you disable things like GhostRank).
Moreover, the source code is unobfuscated and can be viewed directly in your profile directory in Firefox if you want to audit it yourself.
I agree that any conflict of interest should be considered with care, but it would be hard for them to be significantly more transparent than they already are being.
This doesn't have to be a conflict of interest (as they list themselves when they appear), but rather an attempt at self-regulation. Ghostery, and Scott Meyer, has done a lot to advance the discussion of privacy in advertising; they are educating the consumer-giving them tools that make it more difficult to do their job, or at least doing it in a shady and lucrative way for the good of the consumer and the industry.
Similarly much of the opt-out discussions as well as the ad choices icons are industry-driven.
Would you like to cooperate on this? I was thinking about this a long time ago, but I am full of other things to do and need some people to help me with that.
I am no startup-millionair, so please do not expect money, but if we build a small team that delivers, we will find supporters, I am sure. Please contact me at bughunter at riseup dot net.
Are you considering what the GP said, i.e. builds of popular browsers; or another browser entirely? I've been using Luakit a lot recently and it stands for a lot of the open and tweakable traits I care about in software. It probably comes with little spying mechanisms, and could be further strapped on with protections.
Privacy-friendly (as far as it can go) builds of available OS browsers is the way to go.
There are simple things, like changing the default settings for cookies, that do not require rebuild of course, and more involved things like making the browsers emit less information (panopticlick) on every request.
It is obvious, that it might break some things, which should then be possible to change by the user. E.g. not sending out installed fonts and screensize and tons of other info about your system might break some websites - webmasters should learn to ask friendly for that data, not expecting it.
This is not about engineering a new browser, but about privacy aware defaults for software distribution.
The biggest success of such a project would be that browser distributors will change their default distribution to maximum privacy. Obviously some of them will never do it - what will be a good thing as people will better learn about the differences.
Another big success would be that users will learn about their natural right to be asked before a browser sends out any information that is not absolutely needed to view a webpage.
I know that this is only a small piece in the puzzle, but browsers are still not privacy aware by default atm. it would be interesting to see what happens next.
Firefox certainly is one of the top targets for such a project, as Mozilla browser defaults are not acceptable for a project that wants to teach you about your online rights on first browser start. Transforming Firefox into a browser that actually delivers what Mozilla promises, will give a good discussion point for changing their distribution policy.
There is, btw., a similar project for chrome, Iron - but the panopticlick results for iron are still not perfect - minimizin the emitted information to only the neccessary bits is still ahead also for this browser.
Please note: a discussion about "destroying jobs in the ad industry" or "destroying the internet at all" is absurd in this context. If advertisers want to collect data, they must ask me to agree. It is good for the internet future, if only business models survive, that people agree to support.
Firefox is NOT privacy-friendly. The default settings save cookies forever and there is no blocking of any tracking code by default - you are spreading misinformation declaring FF as "privacy-friendly". Another big problem is the fingerprintable request firefox generates - FF developers do not seem to see privacy as a concern.
