In those cases Privacy Badger will allow connections to the third party but will screen out its tracking cookies and referrers (these hosts have their sliders set to the middle, “cookie block” position). In some cases a third-party domain provides some important aspect of a page’s functionality, such as embedded maps, images, or stylesheets. If it observes a single third-party host tracking you on three separate sites, Privacy Badger will automatically disallow content from that third-party tracker. Privacy Badger looks for tracking techniques like uniquely identifying cookies, local storage “supercookies,” first to third party cookie sharing via image pixels, and canvas fingerprinting. Voila!Īt a more technical level, Privacy Badger keeps note of the “third party” domains that embed images, scripts and advertising in the pages you visit. And when your browser stops loading content from a source, that source can no longer track you. 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.
(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. When you view a webpage, that page will often be made up of content from many different sources.
And EFF hopes that by developing rigorous algorithmic and policy methods for detecting and preventing non-consensual tracking, we’ll produce a codebase that could in fact be adopted by those other extensions, or by mainstream browsers, to give users maximal control over who does and doesn’t get to know what they do online. Several of these extensions have business models that we weren’t entirely comfortable with. In our testing, all of them required some custom configuration to block non-consensual trackers. Although we like Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery and similar products, none of them are exactly what we were looking for. Privacy Badger was born out of our desire to be able to recommend a single extension that would automatically analyze and block any tracker or ad that violated the principle of user consent which could function well without any settings, knowledge, or configuration by the user which is produced by an organization that is unambiguously working for its users rather than for advertisers and which uses algorithmic methods to decide what is and isn’t tracking. How is Privacy Badger different from Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery, and other blocking extensions? To the advertiser, it’s like you suddenly disappeared. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser.
Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.