Do you like privacy online? Do you like adorable–if fierce–animals? Of course you do! So you will probably be interested in the fact that, earlier this month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (previously) announced that Privacy Badger, their anti-tracking browser extension, has officially reached 1.0 status, and is now available in a stable release for Chrome and Firefox users.
Privacy Badger differs from adblockers in that it does not block ads as such; instead, it blocks a specific behavior: any online service that attempts to track your behavior across multiple websites. Often, that’s an advertising company. Sometimes, it’s a social media company (Facebook and Twitter track what you read, even when you don’t share it). Sometimes it’s just plain hard to tell. Privacy Badger shuts it all down. (Privacy Badger identifies 28 potentially tracking services on the Chronicle alone!)
It differs from Ghostery, a popular extension that Lincoln recommended in this space a while back, in that Ghostery’s default settings don’t block anything, but just alert you. The EFF also throws a little shade at Ghostery’s business model, which involves making advertising behave better.)
One of the things that this will do is prevent that annoying effect whereby you read an article on one site–or worse, search for something!–and all of a sudden you start seeing ads for the product everywhere. Here is the EFF’s description of how Privacy Badger works:
When you view a webpage, that page will often be made up of content from many different sources. (For example, a news webpage might load the actual article from the news company, ads from an ad company, and the comments section from a different company that’s been contracted out to provide that service.) Privacy Badger keeps track of all of this. If as you browse the web, the same source seems to be tracking your browser across different websites, then Privacy Badger springs into action, telling your browser not to load any more content from that source. And when your browser stops loading content from a source, that source can no longer track you. Voila!
At a more technical level, Privacy Badger keeps note of the “third party” domains that embed images, scripts and advertising in the pages you visit. If a third party server appears to be tracking you without permission, by using uniquely identifying cookies (and, as of version 1.0, local storage super cookies and canvas fingerprinting as well) to collect a record of the pages you visit across multiple sites, Privacy Badger will automatically disallow content from that third party tracker. In some cases a third-party domain provides some important aspect of a page’s functionality, such as embedded maps, images, or stylesheets. In those cases Privacy Badger will allow connections to the third party but will screen out its tracking cookies and referrers.
As I mentioned, this currently only works on Chrome or Firefox, but the EFF does aspire to bring it to more browsers. And if you’re annoyed by ad tracking on your iOS device, remember that this fall’s release of the annual iOS software update should contain ad blocking.
If you use Chrome or Firefox on your desktop or laptop, you’ll certainly want to give Privacy Badger a look.
Photo “Badger” by Flickr user Larry Lamsa / Creative Commons licensed BY–2.0
