Harden your browser

The two that do the most

Block third-party cookies

chrome://settings/cookies · Firefox and Safari block these by default already. This is the single biggest cookie setting you control: it stops a company embedded on thousands of sites from reading the same identifier on each one. Sessyn's Private mode strips cross-site cookie headers as well, so the two reinforce each other rather than overlapping wastefully.

What it costs: some embedded sign-ins, checkout widgets and video players rely on third-party cookies and will break. That is why Chrome still offers an exception list.

Turn off ad topics and measurement

chrome://settings/adPrivacy · Chrome can profile your interests in the browser itself and share them with sites, separately from cookies. There are three switches here — ad topics, site-suggested ads, and ad measurement — and blocking third-party cookies does not turn them off. Turning them off does not cost you anything that looks like a broken site.

Worth doing, smaller effect

Always use secure connections

chrome://settings/security · Upgrades navigation to HTTPS and warns before loading a page that cannot be. Costs you an interstitial on the handful of sites still refusing HTTPS.

Clear cookies when you close all windows

chrome://settings/cookies · A blunt instrument that works: nothing persists between sessions. It signs you out of everything, every time, which is exactly the trade-off Sessyn's “clear known trackers” exists to avoid — use whichever suits how you work.

Turn off preloading

chrome://settings/performance · Preloading fetches pages you have not asked for yet, which means contacting sites you did not choose to visit. Turning it off costs a little speed.

The ones with a real trade-off

“Do Not Track” is not the one that counts

Chrome's own description is honest: “Sites use their discretion when responding to this request.” Almost none honour it, and it was never binding. Global Privacy Control is the one with legal force behind it in several US states, and Sessyn sends it for you once you have granted site access. Sending DNT as well does no harm; just do not mistake it for protection.

Enhanced Safe Browsing

chrome://settings/security · Genuinely better at catching phishing and malicious downloads — and it does it by sending the URLs you visit to Google for checking. That is a real security gain for a real privacy cost, and which way it falls depends on your threat model. Standard protection uses a local list instead and sends far less. We are not going to pretend this one is free.

What none of this fixes

Every setting above is about storage and requests. None of them stop fingerprinting, because a fingerprint is assembled from characteristics your browser has to reveal to render a page at all. None of them affect what a site you are signed in to already knows, and none of them reach data already held on someone's server.

There is no combination of toggles that makes you anonymous. These meaningfully reduce what follows you between sites, which is worth doing on its own terms.