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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.
Should I replace Disconnect.me with it?
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
No, as they are doing a global 'man-in-the-middle' attack on the internet.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
Yeah, this! Who could imagine, for instance, a leading commercial search engine replacing their logo with playful images and games every few days, to celebrate past events?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Privacy Badger claims there are 67 trackers on this page, including ones from NASA and British Telecom.
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?
The point is not to give you irrelevant ads, that's just the consequence of the extension's real purpose, which is to block tracking.
It's an excellent add-on because it doesn't rely on blacklisting like other privacy blockers do. It simply looks for 3rd party hosts are seem to be tracking you (e.g. reading and writing the same cookies across multiple 1st party domains) and blocks them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
I must be doing it right, I only get 4. Unfortunately, Privacy Badger doesn't seem to function properly - it tells me there are 4 but will never load up the list and several of the buttons are unclickable.
You can switch Privacy Badger off for a specific page, but you can't turn if of altogether. If you want it to pause blocking, apparently you need to uninstall, then later install again when you want to resume blocking. I sometimes use "pause blocking" in Ghostery, which for this reason I prefer over Badger. Also, Ghostery has a switch for "block all trackers", In P Badger, you have to switch them on one by one.
no, I don't have a sig
Version 1 of a product is the point where something changes from "pre release", Beta, Developer edition, Alpha etc to Live.
I imagine that a lot of people here are familiar with using Betas - or even create them.
Like you, I have been using Privacy Badger for a while now but now, it is no longer experimental - hopefully anyway.
It should continue to update with time. Good luck to them.
Advertisments, in my mind, tend to be for things that will make the producers money. The EFF is not asking for money for this. You do not have to look at adverts. Do they count downloads? Probably. Do they track users? It would make an interesting story if they did but I think they probably don't.
Slashdit talks about new stuff. We might talk about new versions of Linux. That's not surprising. Someone might want to talk about the new #iShinyShiny thing from Apple as compared to his (more often than not) Android smartphone. People here like to slag off Apple. The EFF gets a more civilised ride.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
First of all there are immortal cookies (infinite cache entries created specifically for your unique PC). Secondly, there's a unique combination of your web browser + OS + fonts + plug ins: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ Thirdly, there are unique patterns in your behaviour (websites that you visit and how frequently you do that) and other wonderful metrics to trace you.
If you want to avoid being traced and tracked there's just one way:
This is actually a recipe for browsing the web anonymously however this is the reality of the modern web - not to be traced means to be anonymous as much as possible.
There was an add on that would send bogus information to the trackers. If not, there should be.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
One thing that annoys me to no end with Chrome is the stupid "status bubble". I hate when things move on the page I'm trying to read and having that stupid thing fade in and out every time I hover a link is just too distracting. And in typical Google we-know-better-than-you fashion, there's no option to disable this stupid thing and get a classic status bar instead.
Too bad it still doesn't work in Seamonkey :-(
uBlock is extremely user-friendly. It's basically just one button: an on/off toggle. uMatrix is the extensions that's aimed at advanced users and provides both additional information and more granular control over what's getting blocked.
http://www.yro.slashdot.org/st...
2015 story has a new version.
Thank you, I've been running it since that story with Firefox. Looking for a version # I found that Privacy Badger has been on auto update (something I normally disable in any program) so not sure what version I started with.
It's FireFox I only use it when I must and always as a gateway to my games.
Privacy badger is ok, I wouldn't run it alone. I posted about Privacy Badger just a few days ago, /. shows 3 blocks others showed they had many more; I use a HOSTS file so know what's being blocked just not where (which site).
Thanks for the tip of uMatrix, folks. Trying it out now to see how it works compared to NoScript, AdBlock+, et al.
Trolling is a art,
No i disagree its not. Tell me just what i should choose? And no the default option isn't and doesn't always remove what you want sometimes they keep coming back even after choosing the default option to block.Their is no way to report unbockable items, no way to report unblocked popups and so on. Sometime it blocks the whole site by accident why would a casual user know what to do to fix it except to uninstall it. What would a casual user do when given the below options?
Click, Ctrl-click ##h4 ##.title ###comment_top_50269409 ###comment_50269409 ###tree_50269409 ###commtree_50269253 ###tree_50269253 ###commtree_50267595 ###tree_50267595 ###commentlisting ###commentwrap ##.d2incommentspl ###comments ###firehose ###content ##.col_2 ##.smack-refactor.container ###fix
Jack of all trades,master of none
Yep. My Ghostery says 7.
Oh for fuck's sake not this guy again. Why can't Slashdot filter this bozo out?
It's probably their evercookie, (thanks a lot, Samy!). Try deleting FB's cookie. Watch it pop back up. You have to kill the browser to get rid of it. Plus, you have those FB "share" buttons on every web page, nowadays. Ghostery can block those, I believe.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
uBlock isn't perfect (few things in life are), but the fact that it comes up a bit short in some areas doesn't mean that it isn't user-friendly. I installed it on my (non-technical) wife's computer two weeks ago and as far as I know she's had zero issues with it. She's able to browse all of her sites without problem, but now they load significantly faster and have a higher visual signal:noise ratio.
Moreover, if you're talking about being persnickety enough to want perfect blocking and are willing to go so far as changing around options for a browser extension, then you're no longer talking about casual users, since casual users simply don't pull up the options for ANY of their extensions. Rather, if something doesn't work, they'll simply look for a way to disable it, which uBlock makes ridiculously obvious and simple to do on the sites it doesn't (yet) work on.
As for you, it sounds like you may be better served by uMatrix. The first few days were a bit rough for me, but after that it only needs tweaking when I visit new sites, for the most part, and even then, not very often.
I an just fine with ublock. I said for casual users and i am sticking by my comment. We agree to disagree.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Privacy Badger has no support for Safari which makes it a no go for most Mac users.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
I second your experience. Its a great tool
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I only use Adblock Plus and NoScript, because I feel like I'd get diminishing returns from using 4 different addons for privacy and blocking bad traffic due to stacked redundancy.
How much will this help me out?
Not really, because it doesn't solve the same class of problems.
Ezekiel 23:20
https://www.robtex.com/ clicking on a disqus.com icon you will be met with a requester to abort and reason: "Logging into Disqus can allow it to track you around the web". Answering no shows what u had to post was not that important.
My Post was to help, the IP address 72.21.91.29 shows over 100 pages containing malware (most I've seen) but it's a feed for the UseNet where Malware is expected and fairly obvious. Not a big deal.
I took a back door approach to get a disqus.com account (through robtex.com) I had no ToS (privacy policy) to read.
Post to Robtex.com can be posted without account, and how I will from now on.
Was kool though, sitting unobtrusively all this time in the menu bar, when it tosses up an alert you take notice. The reason for Privacy Badger showing a plus, sorry but many just say a bad site ahead awaits u.
That Disqus.com didn't make the HOSTS file? No clue, I dropped the ball.
I have checked https://www.robtex.com/ while I found no Google links before, nor mention of Google in the FAQ (no ToS), the site reeks of Google (very nice, good useful info). It's no big deal, it's just http://testmy.net/ was Google yet they hid the fact, vs Flurry.com, it took some digging and many links from original ToS but you would find a Google ToS. A post reply was by one of the admins of how much they enjoyed working for Google, and I questioned the ToS; It was changed to a Google ToS; Changed now to: no clue (not read yet) but just assume Google and do what you do - I leave Google alone but for advertising, and data collection other than what I know (my choice) is going to be Public domain (my searches for one).
FWIW https://disqus.com/ gives no alert.
it's just http://testmy.net/ was Google yet they hid the fact, vs Flurry.com, it took some digging and many links from original ToS but you would find a Google ToS. A post reply was by one of the admins of how much they enjoyed working for Google, and I questioned the ToS; It was changed to a Google ToS; Changed now to: no clue (not read yet)
Read, it takes a link from "Third Parties & Use of Cookies" in the Privacy Policy to show it is a Google site http://www.google.com/policies...
How can you block things with undesirable contents using IP level rejection? A single domain or IP address can serve both things that you want and things that you don't want.
Ezekiel 23:20
Let me know when it runs in Windows 10 and/or OS X. Otherwise, you're wasting your time posting your copy/paste spam in response to me yet again. I'll actually take a look at it if I can run it on my home systems though, since I do like keeping an updated hosts file in coordination with the other ad blocking tools I use.
Yes, yes, we've all seen your spam a million times. Which is why it's called spam. Why not try to keep it down to one per thread? You'll come across as less of a lunatic.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped