“Until the online tracking industry changes its ways, the only option for users is to protect themselves by installing tools such as Privacy Badger“. If it then finds that certain companies are receiving information about you via unique cookies as you visit different pages across the Web, the extension will block the loading of content from that source in future, thereby stopping you being tracked. Called the Privacy Badger version 1.0, the extension is now available for Chrome and Firefox. Privacy Badger, released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), comes in response to the rise in non-consensual tracking of people’s web-browsing habits carried out by advertising companies.
As you browse the Web, Privacy Badger looks at any third party domains that are loaded on a given site and determines whether or not they appear to be tracking you (e.g.by setting cookies that could be used for tracking, or fingerprinting your browser). This is basically a message delivered to every website you visit that says “do not track me, please”. It also asks advertisers and data collection companies to respect users’ decision to not be tracked.
Through Privacy Badger, the EFF intends to produce a codebase which would be adopted by other extensions, or by mainstream browsers, to empower users to control who does and doesn’t get to know what they do online.
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.
The extension is now capable of detecting which Web services honor the user’s DNT setting, allowing them to show anonymous ads, while sites that don’t will continue to be blackballed.
The EFF has released the stable version of its browser add-on, branded Privacy Badger for some unknown reason, in order to “put an end to non-consensual browser tracking”.
A new tool has been deployed in the fight against online surveillance in the form of a browser plug-in that blocks spying ads and invisible trackers.
Privacy Badger is available for download at the low, low cost of free right now.
