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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.
I've been running this for a while now. It is a little strange they say version 1.0 has been released when the current version is numbered 2015.8.5.1 ?
The fine article mentioned:
Honestly, it is not always obvious that is actually working. I mean, sure, there is a red number shown how many sites it has blocked, but the actual useful stat is the options which lists ALL the sites you have visited that are tracking you: chrome-extension://pkehgijcmpdhfbdbbnkijodmdjhbjlgp/skin/options.html
Maybe I guess that's the point though -- it just works in the background so there is one less thing to worry about.
ghostery blocks 6 from this page alone
I actually suggested this directly to EFF a year or two ago. Basically have some extension that lowers the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where you can't find the signal. There are problems with this approach, though. You would need to trigger a lot of extra network traffic to hide your true (intended) actions. Also, if you want to hide all searches/traffic, you'd have to have your extension do a lot of fake pr0n traffic, too. Would everyone want an extension that does that? And finally, there are lots of heuristics that can be used to sort out the real traffic from the fake "chaff" traffic... how you click on the links, how long you are on the pages, how you interact with the pages, etc.
But I agree... I wish there was some automated way to poison this well and make it useless for trackers.
The bottom line is that we need a better way to pay for the web content we all consume. Micropayments? Google Contributor is interesting. Advertising is ruining the experience, causing tons of unnecessary and unwanted web traffic, and is becoming ineffective with the rise of ad blockers. As long as everyone wants everything to be "free", we're going to have this tracking problem.