FAQ

General

Certainly not. PlusPrivacy has several unique and important privacy protection features that have nothing to do with ad blocking, e.g. management of privacy settings in social networks, email identities, connected apps and more. PlusPrivacy’s functions are managed from its Dashboard.

PlusPrivacy’s ad blocker is based on Adblock Plus open source code. If you wish, you can turn PlusPrivacy’s ad blocker off and use PlusPrivacy together with another ad blocker.

Install the PlusPrivacy Chrome extension and you are ready to go. The dashboard is accessible from the {+P} icon on the browser extensions toolbar.

If you prefer to use PlusPrivacy anonymously, do not sign in and do not log in. See here for limitations in such case.

Yes, search for them on F-droid, Google Play and Apple App Store.

No. We are looking for open source contributors to help develop a Firefox version. Please contact us if you want to help.

Maximizing privacy on social networks

Go to Dashboard -> Social Networks  or Home and click “Single click privacy”.

This will configure all your privacy settings on Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to their most privacy-friendly values.

Yes.  Go to Dashboard -> Social Networks -> specific social network and click “Update settings”.

Yes. Go to Dashboard -> specific social network. Change settings and click “Update settings”.

Yes, in this blog entry.

Connected apps

These are 3rd party apps and Web services that are connected to your data on social networks and cloud storage services. In some cases you may not be aware of this, or maybe you gave permission to such apps to access your data and forgot about it.

The “Connected apps” function of PlusPrivacy discovers all the apps connected to your Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Dropbox accounts, shows them to you and allows you to cancel access for each of such apps in a single click, from the Dashboard.

Browser extensions may also have access to your private data. For convenience, we included them under the “Connected apps” tab, so you can uninstall or disable each of them from the Dashboard.

PlusPrivacy rates each browser extension by assigning it a level of intrusiveness on your privacy on a 1 to 10 scale, and allows you to view individual permissions given to each extension. For each extension, this should help you to decide if you want to keep, disable or uninstall it.

Yes, in this blog entry.

Consent deals

This opt-in feature will enable you to share some of your data in exchange for an economic benefit – only if you explicitly choose to do so!

My identities

PlusPrivacy email identities allow you to register to websites and services anonymously, and communicate by email without disclosing your real email address.

To do so, you provide an alternative email address  (“identity”) to websites and people, in the form (your alternative identity)@plusprivacy.com, instead of your real email address. Emails sent to your alternative identity will be relayed to the email address with which you are registered to PlusPrivacy. When you reply to these emails, they will be relayed to the original sender, with your alternative identity placed in the From field of the email message.

Currently up to 20 email identities are supported. if you reach the limit, you can delete some and generate new ones.

Yes, in this blog entry.

Ad blocking and anti-tracking

PlusPrivacy’s ad blocker is based on open source code of and is functionally identical to Adblock Plus (except there are no ‘acceptable ads” in PlusPrivacy, all ads are blocked by default).

Yes. Different ad blockers sometimes address non-overlapping issues.

Yes.

Go to Dashboard -> Ad blocking and anti-tracking and set the “Enable ad blocking and anti-tracking” switch to the “off” position.

Yes. Click the {+P} icon on the extensions toolbar in the browser and toggle “Ads blocked on this site”.

Privacy and anonymity of use

Yes. Identity management and consent deals will not be available in such case, but the rest of PlusPrivacy functions will work.

Full details are here .

Community

Yes. On GitHub.

Community info is here. Help in developing a FireFox version is particularly sought after from open source developers.

Please let us know if you want to help.