---
title: Freedom and privacy in the Web
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2018/program/proposals/458
beginning: '2018-11-09T16:30:00.000-08:00'
end: '2018-11-09T17:20:00.000-08:00'
presenters:
- name: Ruben Rodriguez
  affiliation: GNU
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/755
  gravatar_id: 021307be6571118b2594354d935a0702
  biography: Spaniard, software engineer, photographer, GNU hacker, guitar player,
    ape descendant. Ruben started his career developing free software for research
    centers and universities, then founded the Trisquel GNU/Linux distribution project
    and other nonprofits. He is a maintainer for GNU IceCat and GNU LibreJS, tools
    which provide freedom and privacy oriented web browsing. He is a senior systems
    administrator at the Free Software Foundation, he likes dogs and paragliding,
    and dislikes writing about himself.
---

Websites and the technologies they are built on continue to evolve from the static text documents of old (with the occasional image, tiled background and blinking marquee) to very elaborate pieces of interactive software, with both local and remote code execution that brings all kinds of overlooked privacy and user freedom concerns. Fueled by practicality and monetization incentives, web developers regularly impose non-free JavaScript to their visitors, who also have to suffer being tracked and fingerprinted by all kinds of third parties.

In this talk we will explore the sometimes obscure issues at play, and we will discuss tools and practices for end users to protect their freedom and privacy when browsing the Web, and for site developers to be able to offer an interactive, feature-rich experience to their visitors in freedom-respecting ways.

Attendees will learn about the [JavaScript Trap](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html) and its [solutions](https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/), as well as [fingerprinting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint) and other forms of browser [tracking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_visitor_tracking), and how to work around those and other issues from both the visitor and the webmaster side.
