US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Peter Presland]

So Peter, FF is the only safe of the big name browsers?

Well, it depends on how you define 'safe'

It is the only one whose code base is public property, so it does not do such things as 'report back to base' periodically without your knowledge or authority, or have a remotely activatable switch that might do all sorts of other things one can imagine might be contained in proprietary code.

OTOH, it does not protect against browser profiling; nothing does. Have a look at this site and see how identifiable you are simply by the relative uniqueness of your browser footprint. The more security measures you include in your browser, the more unique its footprint becomes. Applying reductio-ad-absurdam says that if you make your browser uniquely protected against all OTHER potential exploits, your actual identity will become uniquely identifiable by the boffins who specialise in this sort of stuff - It's enough to drive you barmy.

So yes, the simple answer is FF is the best browser. But there's more to both privacy/encryption and anonymity than just the browser you use and you simply cannot stay ahead of the NSA on this stuff - what you CAN do is make life just a little more difficult for them and that's about it.

If you become a POI, then there's really no hiding place I'm afraid.