EFF Releases Privacy Badger, an Addon That Algorithmically Blocks Online Trackers

New submitter zfc writes: Online tracking has become a pervasive invisible reality of the modern web. Most sites you load are likely to be full of ads, tracking pixels, social media share buttons, and other invisible trackers all harvesting data about your web browsing. These trackers use cookies and other methods to read unique IDs associated with your browser, the result being that they record all the sites you visit as you browse around the internet. This sort of tracking is invisible to most web users, meaning they never get the option to agree to or opt-out of it. Today the EFF has launched the 1.0 version of Privacy Badger, an extension designed to prevent these trackers from accessing unique info about you and your browsing.

Comments

Re:eff? I will try it

[JSG]

Privacy badger sees 7, no sorry, 8 trackers on this site (an extra one appears when you hit Reply)

Been using it since it came out - very light on resources and does one job well.

Re:How good is it?

[joelpurra]

I'm not involved in the development of uMatrix nor Disconnect.me, I just used Disconnect.me's blocklist for scientific third-party/tracker research.

• Ghostery uses a blacklist, so it's always running behind tracker companies. Plus, Ghostery itself is owned by an marketing company.
• uBlock was created by the same guy who created uMatrix, Raymond Hill (gorhill), but Matrix is much more fine-grained for advanced users. (Block has been forked, and it looks a bit messy.)
• ScriptSafe looks like a limited and messy version of uMatrix, and also seems to use some code written by Raymond Hill (gorhill). Haven't tried it though.

Basically, I would replace these with uMatrix.