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

1.0? Current version is 2015.8.5.1

[UnknownSoldier]

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:

Privacy Badger 1.0 works in tandem with the new Do Not Track (DNT) policy, announced earlier this week by EFF, Disconnect, Medium, Mixpanel, Adblock, and DuckDuckGo.

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.

Re:eff? I will try it

[chewy_fruit_loop]

ghostery blocks 6 from this page alone

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: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.

Re:How good is it?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

using heuristics like Privacy Badger is probably better

Now you are doomed. The hosts file army will obliterate you, all one of them.

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?

Re:Poison the well

[cbp2]

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.

Re:eff? I will try it

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:How good is it?

[JMJimmy]

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

Sure if you want 3rd party ad services to install malware/spyware/etc on your system.

Re:How good is it?

[hairyfeet]

Works great, been running it for about a year now and it shuts down the tracks hard. What I like is it gives YOU control over each tracker so that if there is a site you need it on just for a minute to say load the comments? you can do that. great tool.

Re:What's the differenece between this and ublock?

[Anubis IV]

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.