[Privoxy-users] Privoxy Bypassed by Opera Data Saver

[Ian Silvester]

If I understand Opera Data Saver correctly, it operates by rendering web
pages on the server side (within their server farm) and passing you a
resulting page that 'weighs less' compared with the original page. In
effect then, as you say, Opera is acting as a proxy between your device
and the real internet. As such, Privoxy is rendered ineffective because
all URLs become those served from Opera's own server farm, hiding the
original URLs upon which Privoxy depends to perform its filtering.

I'm afraid then that if my understanding is correct about how Opera Data
Saver operates then Privoxy cannot be used to filter content in such a
setup at all. You could experiment with client-side plugins to filter
content, but these too will suffer (likely to a lesser degree) from
difficulty in identifying undesirable content, for the same reasons
Privoxy does.

On the bright side, Privoxy in and of itself saves data usage in that
the ads, scripts and trackers it blocks do not get downloaded. It no
doubt does not save as much bandwidth as Opera's tool, but the
difference in weight between the vanilla web and the Privoxy'ed
equivalent is not inconsiderable.

No doubt you've already weighed the costs versus benefits of Opera's
solution, but it is worth mentioning that in using it you are allowing
Opera themselves to track your entire web browsing history. Is this
worth the data saved?

Ian


My PGP public
key[http://diem.serveftp.net:8080/IanSilvesterPGPPublicKey.asc]

On Tue, 17 Jan 2017, at 19:45, Bill L wrote:
> On my Android device(v6.01), running Opera Beta with data saver turned
> on,
> I find that it bypasses privoxy running on the lan and permits blocked
> web
> pages and ads through. I assume that Opera is using it's own proxy in
> this
> case. This does not happen with Chrome for Android. Besides not using
> data
> saver is there any other way to make sure blocked content doesn't get
> past?
> I also note that this does happen on my laptops running Ubuntu 16.04
> Opera but doesn't with Chrome.
> Any suggestions?
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