// the find
SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
A simple web extension that redirects Twitter, YouTube, Instagram & Google Maps requests to privacy friendly alternatives.
A browser extension for Firefox, Chrome and Edge that redirects Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google Maps, Reddit, Google Search and Google Translate to privacy-focused frontends such as Nitter, Invidious, OpenStreetMap and DuckDuckGo. It is for people who want to stop sending their browsing to those platforms but still want to see the content.
- Each service has its own on/off toggle and its own helper file under src/assets/javascripts/helpers, so you can keep YouTube redirected while leaving Maps alone, and changing one site's rules doesn't mean touching the others.
- The repo handles real edge cases rather than only the happy-path URL rewrite. remove-twitter-sw.js deals with Twitter's service worker, and persist-invidious-prefs.js keeps Invidious settings across sessions.
- Custom instance support is straightforward. If you set an instance it is used, and if you don't, the extension picks one at random, which spreads load across frontends instead of pinning everyone to one that might go down.
- The last push was 2023-09-05, about three years before this review. Every redirect here depends on third-party frontends whose health changes quickly, so an unmaintained extension will drift out of step with them.
- The README says the extension needs access to all navigation events, because embedded-video iframe redirects need it and the author knows of no alternative. For a privacy tool that is one of the broadest permissions a browser grants, and the cost falls on the user.
- Random instance selection by default sends your traffic to whichever third-party operator was picked, and the extension doesn't say so. Bibliogram is effectively abandoned, and many public Nitter instances stopped working after X tightened guest access, so users are likely to hit dead or untrustworthy frontends without any warning.