The features described in this article were added to Plucky in v1.0.10, so they won’t work in earlier versions.
Overview
Safe browsing, safe searching, and Plucky.
Plucky has 2 generic “safe” options for enabling various safe browsing options on the Internet.
- safe
- Enable most “safe” browsing technologies.
- safer
- Enable even “safer” browsing technologies.
The above are intentionally generic so that end-users who don’t care about the details can specify one of the above and get what they get. To use one of these features, just enable it at the command line, like so:
pluck + safer
These generic options may include technologies that allow third parties (such as Google) to observe your browsing. If this concerns you, see the privacy section below.
Many of the safe options only work in Chrome-based browser (Brave, Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi, etc.). If you want to prevent Firefox from being used to bypass safe options, use nofirefox. These options have no effect on Android.
pluck + safe
pluck + nofirefox
It is worth noting that most “safe” options take precedence over all Plucky’s allow rules, including allow everything.
TL;DR
If you want “smart filtering”, use pluck + safe and pluck + nofirefox, or look into one of the other options on how to block only bad sites.
If the result filters too much of youtube, use pluck + unsafeyoutube.
If the result filters too little of youtube, use pluck + safer.
If you are zealous about privacy read more about pluck + unsafesites.
Details
Plucky has 5 primitive “safe” options that correspond to various safe searching options on the Internet.
- safegoogle
- safe searching on google
- safeplease
- safe searching wherever possible
- safesites
- ask Google if a site is “safe”
- safeyoutube
- safe searching on youtube
- saferyoutube
- strict searching on youtube
Each of these has a corresponding “unsafe” option that can be specified as well.
- unsafegoogle
- un-safegoogle
- unsafeplease
- un-safeplease
- unsafesites
- un-safesites
- unsafeyoutube
- un-safeyoutube
- unsaferyoutube
- un-saferyoutube
The generic options are a handy way to enable many specific ones.
- safe
- safegoogle + safeplease + safesites + safeyoutube
- safer
- safe + saferyoutube
Privacy and unsafesites
First, a word of warning. Before you conclude that you would never, under any circumstances, allow Google any chance to know what sites you visit, consider 3 things.
-
Do you use https://www.google.com/ for search? Maybe Google already knows what sites you visit.
-
What do you fear would happen, realistically, if Google did know everything about your Internet use?
-
Consider for a moment how much you value your privacy, and how much you value the filtering that safe browsing can provide. Do not succumb to a privacy-is-everything knee-jerk reaction without giving due consideration to what’s really valuable for your life.
Having said that, if you want safe search, but you do not want Google involved, do this:
pluck + safe
pluck + unsafesites
Per-user safe features
The safe features apply to all users on the computer. See here for a creative method for causing a safe feature to apply to some users but not others.
Other recommended settings
duckduckgo
If you’d like to force strict search on https://duckduckgo.com/ :
pluck + block duckduckgo.com text/html
pluck + allow safe.duckduckgo.com text/html
or, if you want images and video:
pluck + block duckduckgo.com text/html
pluck + allow safe.duckduckgo.com
If you want this to be your default search engine in Chrome, see how to set default search engine in chrome.
Last updated: 2024-10-31