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:How good is it?

[joelpurra]

Disconnect.me uses a blacklist based on known tracker domains. Given that this blacklist based blocking only detects about 10% [1] of global top web sites' resources from third party domains (loosely defined as "not the same domain, nor a subdomain"), using heuristics like Privacy Badger is probably better. Either way, they can work together. Blacklists are convenient but easy to get around for tracker companies (for example by buying a new domain). Shared whitelists are convenient, but will invariably add too many or too broad exceptions too please more users, allowing tracker companies to sneak past (for example by using, by disconnnect.me, whitelisted cloudfront.net and other CDNs for easy forwarding/domain masking). Having a personal whitelist that you maintain yourself to your own needs is a good way to go. I personally use Matrix for resource whitelisting, with a stricter ruleset blocking all third-party domains by default. It's easy to whitelist specific resource types per domain (like css and images, but not javascript), I understand that most people don't care enough to bother though. https://github.com/gorhill/uMa... [1] I have researched third party resource usage and blocking specifically using disconnect.me's blacklist, so go ahead and check it out. [/shameless plug] http://joelpurra.com/projects/...

Re:How good is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so good that I've stopped using AdBlock and instead just have Privacy Badger and FlashBlock.

Poison the well

[superid]

I'd rather disrupt the whole tracking network by injecting false information on a mass scale to ruin the economic value of tracking.
Are there any add-ins that do that?