Stoutner

Programs that respect your privacy

Author: Soren Stoutner

  • February 2017 Roadmap

    I thought it would be valuable to lay down a development roadmap. 2.0 – Automatic loading of privacy settings by domain. 2.x – Cleanup of small bugs and polishing. 2.x – SSL certificate pinning. 2.x – Addition of READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE and WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions. Encrypted import, export, and sync of settings. Download file location option. Allow uploading…

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  • Privacy Browser 1.15

    Privacy Browser 1.15 has been released. A user submitted a bug showing how some web pages, like Twitter, store information in a cache that isn’t deleted through the normal cache deletion commands. It turns out that WebView has a secret cache stored in /data/data/com.stoutner.privacybrowser.standard/ app_webview/Service Worker/CacheStorage. I submitted a bug to Google requesting an API…

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  • Privacy Browser 1.14.1

    Privacy Browser 1.14.1 fixes a bug that caused Privacy Browser to crash on some websites when ad blocking was enabled.

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  • Privacy Browser 1.14

    Privacy Browser 1.16 has an integrated ad blocker based on pgl.yoyo.org’s ad server list. It is enabled by default. Ha Duy Trung wrote an interesting guide to ad blocking in WebView, which was what initially pointed me to pgl.yoyo.org as the source of a good ad server list, although my code implementation ended up being substantially different than…

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  • 2016 Security and Privacy Canary

    Backdoors During 2016, Stoutner received 0 requests from governments or organizations to insert backdoors into Privacy Browser. During 2016, Stoutner inserted 0 backdoors into Privacy Browser. Privacy During 2016, Stoutner received 0 requests from governments or organizations to weaken the privacy of Privacy Browser. During 2016, Stoutner has made 0 changes to weaken the privacy…

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  • Downloaded File Locations

    Update With the release of Privacy Browser 2.9, most of the following information is now obsolete.  Privacy Browser 2.9 includes the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission.  On devices running Android Lollipop (API 22) and older and on devices running Android Marshmallow (API 23) and newer that allow the storage permission, downloads will now be saved in the public…

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  • Video Playback

    With the release of Privacy Browser 1.13, the default user agent was changed to PrivacyBrowser/1.0. This causes most website to load the desktop instead of the mobile version. There are implications for YouTube playback that were interesting enough to warrant a separate post. When a YouTube video, either on YouTube’s website or embedded in another…

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  • Privacy Browser 1.13

    Privacy Browser 1.13 adds a full-screen browsing mode. Double-tapping on the screen will hide the app bar and make the system and navigation bars translucent. There is an option in the settings to make the full-screen mode hide the system and navigation bars as well. In this mode, they can be temporarily shown by swiping…

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  • KitKat Security Problems

    Charles Fisher brought to my attention that SSL encryption on KitKat is insecure (outdated) and susceptible to MITM (Man In The Middle) attacks when visiting secure websites using Privacy Browser. A MITM attack is performed by a third party that owns some of the network equipment between a browser and the website it is trying to…

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  • Updated Privacy Policy

    Stoutner’s privacy prolicy has been updated. Verison 1.3 adds sections for Google Play and direct communications, like email and website comments. It also clarifies that in all cases reasonable effort is made to not use information in a way that would make users uncomfortable.

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