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Help EFF Test Privacy Badger; New Tool to Stop Creepy Online Tracking

posted by martyb on Saturday May 03 2014, @01:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the sending-trackers-on-an-off-track-trek dept.

Anonymous Coward writes:

"EFF is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them."

From the launch description:

Privacy Badger is EFF's answer to intrusive and objectionable practices in the online advertising industry, and many advertisers' outright refusal to meaningfully honor Do Not Track requests. This week, Mozilla published research showing that privacy is the single most important thing that users want from their web browsers. Privacy Badger is part of EFF's growing campaign to deliver that privacy by giving you the technical means to disallow trackers within the pages you read on the Web.

This is an alpha release; we've been using it internally and don't think it's too buggy. But we're looking for intrepid users to try it out and let us know before we encourage millions of people to install it. If you find bugs, you can file them on github against either the Firefox or Chrome repos as appropriate.

You can try out Privacy Badger today on Firefox and Chrome.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03 2014, @06:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 03 2014, @06:18PM (#39291)

    from what I understand, its a heuristic version of Disconnect/Ghostery without a pre-defined blacklist that only blocks things on your browser that attempt to track you across pages (such as static image trackers and so on), it seems rather interesting but given its early development state I opted to hold off on testing it for a while until things settle down.

    I like the idea of it.

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  • (Score: 1) by b on Saturday May 03 2014, @11:33PM

    by b (2121) on Saturday May 03 2014, @11:33PM (#39338)

    So if I block third-party cookies then this extension is moot?

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Maow on Sunday May 04 2014, @02:10AM

      by Maow (8) on Sunday May 04 2014, @02:10AM (#39362) Homepage

      So if I block third-party cookies then this extension is moot?

      Probably not.

      Allow me to speculate on how this new tool might work: look for sites that provide 1px images and are included via plain old HTML (JavaScript optional).

      If such hosts are referenced on > 1 site, heuristics indicate that they ought to be blocked.

      Cookies wouldn't come into play in this scenario, yet such a tool could still block some significant amount of tracking.

      • (Score: 1) by b on Sunday May 04 2014, @02:27AM

        by b (2121) on Sunday May 04 2014, @02:27AM (#39364)

        Aha, very clever. So in theory Adblock Plus's EasyPrivacy list should block the tracking site, but this new tool will catch tracking sites that the filter list has missed. And being plain-HTML based, noscript/disconnect/taco will all miss it.