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Electronic Frontier Foundation Privacy The Internet

EFF Releases Privacy Badger, an Addon That Algorithmically Blocks Online Trackers 136

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-track-me-bro dept.
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.
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EFF Releases Privacy Badger, an Addon That Algorithmically Blocks Online Trackers More

EFF Releases Privacy Badger, an Addon That Algorithmically Blocks Online Trackers

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  • Should I replace Disconnect.me with it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rvw ( 755107 )

      Should I replace Disconnect.me with it?

      Isn't Disconnect a tracker service itself?

    • Re:How good is it? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by joelpurra ( 4212715 ) on Friday August 07, 2015 @02:37AM (#50267661) Homepage
      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... [github.com] [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/... [joelpurra.com]

      • using heuristics like Privacy Badger is probably better

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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      While we are on the topic of blocking malware, DoNotSpy10 [pxc-coding.com] is an essential tool if you are using Windows 10 to decrapify it of spyware and ads.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

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

      • 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.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I've been using it for about 2 months. Now that version 1 is out, I will upgrade. I do prefer it to adbloc. It will require some manual settings that you must make to benefit from it. For example, when you visit a page, or a site, it will tell you about the trackers and provide you the option to disable the ones that you deem harmful to your system or to your privacy. By the way, once setup, for a site, it remains that way, until the trackers arrive with new names. That has not happened to me yet.

  • 1.0? Current version is 2015.8.5.1 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Friday August 07, 2015 @02:28AM (#50267631)

    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: (Score:2)

      by Dins ( 2538550 )

      It is a little strange they say version 1.0 has been released when the current version is numbered 2015.8.5.1 ?

      "2015.August.5th.Version 1", perhaps? Just a guess.

  • Privacy Badger claims there are 67 trackers on this page, including ones from NASA and British Telecom.

  • Poison the well (Score:5, Interesting)

    by superid ( 46543 ) on Friday August 07, 2015 @06:37AM (#50268071) Homepage

    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?

    • I don't know if it is feasible but I kind of like that idea. What are the downsides?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cbp2 ( 60260 )

      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

      • Any degradation of the quality of the 'signal' is good, and more is better but the noise doesn't have to really completely overwhelm the signal. Reducing the advertising value of the data by any amount would be progress, at least.

    • AdNauseam is all about this poisoning of the well: https://dhowe.github.io/AdNaus... [github.io]

    • TrackMeNot is good to flood search engines
      http://addons.mozilla.org/en-U... [mozilla.org]

      AdNauseam is about flooding click ads
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]

      Flagger is more poking fun at surveillance organizations
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Any decent browser will let you disable the addon without uninstalling it...

  • 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/ [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:

    • You buy a single time anonymous SIM card.
    • You go to some public place

    • It's not binary. It's not "tracked" vs "untracked". It's a question of how expensive it is to track you and how reliable the data is. Raise the cost and fewer advertisers will bother. Raise it high enough and maybe we can substantially damage the ad industry.

  • There was an add on that would send bogus information to the trackers. If not, there should be.
  • Too bad it still doesn't work in Seamonkey :-(

  • 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?

  • https://www.robtex.com/ [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

    • it's just http://testmy.net/ [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... [google.com]

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